...West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who ran as a gun-totin', old-school Democrat who promised to fight the administration, cut spending, and repeal "the bad parts of Obamacare" (video below) has yet to find anything to fight the administration on, has struggled to find any spending worth cutting, and has yet to find any "bad parts" of Obamacare, as his vote yesterday proved:
All Democrats in the U.S. Senate just voted to preserve funding for the national health care law, with the measure being rejected by a 47 to 53 vote straight party line vote.
The Obamacare defunding vote could be particularly harmful to Sen. Joe Manchin who won a special election in West Virginia last year by convincing voters that he was a conservative Democrat who would buck party leadership.
In fact, weeks before the election, Manchin said he was open to repealing the health care law entirely.
Well, it appears as if Manchin says a lot of things - unfortunately, most of them are not true. Being that the Democrats were going to win yesterday's vote anyway, Manchin could have easily voted against it symbolically, in for no other reason than to show his "independence" to the people he claims to represent.
But he didn't. Which means that he honestly believes - and always has - that Obamacare is just fine the way it is, or that he buckled to administration pressure - the same one he promised to fight - in order to show a united party front.
It seems as if Manchin believes - like most of his party - that West Virginians are too stupid to know the difference, and will believe whatever he tells them when he runs for re-election in 2012.
I don't think he'll get away with it. They won't get fooled again...
Here's the video of Manchin making all sorts of promises to West Virginia voters that he had no intentions of keeping: