Glass Chin

What do you get when you take that rarer than hen's lips creature, the popular Democrat governor, put him in an open race for a Senate seat his party has held almost literally forever in its worst political cycle on the congressional level in thirty years, and then add a big dollop of his supporters' support for him being tied to remaining in his current office?

Joe Manchin's flip-flop on ObamaCare:

Manchin endorsed President Obama's efforts on landmark health care reform and voiced support for the bill before and after its passage in March. Now, just five weeks away from a tougher Senate race than he expected against Republican John Raese, the governor said in an interview with RealClearPolitics that he supports many basic components of the law but volunteered that some of it needs to be repealed.

"I believe in health care reform. I don't believe in the way this bill was passed," Manchin said Sunday afternoon. "Why they overreached, I don't know."

Pressed on his support for repeal, Manchin clarified that he favored "repealing the things that are bad in that bill." He ticked off a list of reforms in the law that he supports and asserted there is broad agreement in both parties for many of them. "Can't you keep that as a good base?" he said, adding, "It's a great bill." He emphasized that he's not calling for wholesale repeal and just wants to roll back parts of it but said, "You do need to."

Manchin remains popular in West Virginia while his congressional counterparts and Barack Obama rank somewhere between mange and syphilis.  His attempt to join them in D.C. likely accounts for the fact of his not being as popular as he was before he jumped into the race for the Byrd seat.  And that, in turn, explains much of why he's belatedly attempting to sound as different from the congressional Donks that inflicted that bureaucratic malignancy on us.

This would explain the rest:

Republican John Raese has edged ahead of West Virginia’s popular Democratic Governor Joe Manchin for the first time in the state’s special U.S. Senate race.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely West Virginia Voters finds Raese earning 48% support to Manchin’s 46% when leaners are included. Two percent (5%) prefer some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided.

What stands out about this dynamic is Manchin's helplessness.  There doesn't appear to be anything he can do to reverse his cratering fortunes, because they're primarily due to factors entirely beyond his control - i.e. the vast unpopularity of congressional Democrats.  A case of being the right candidate in the right place at the Godawfulest time.

And, yes, that federal criminal probe of his gubernatorial office isn't helping matters.

So the Chin is left advocating what passes for the current middle ground on an issue that has never really had one to begin with, unless you counted the leap all the way to single-payer as the ultimate quantum leap destination (which a lot of lefties did).  And it wouldn't work in any case, both policy-wise (because the economic infeasibility of O-Care is both joint and several) and politically (because neither side would accept it).  He's negotiating himself to the Republican side of the argument, which reinforces that there's already a Republican there making it, without the compromises West Virginies don't want.

The saving grace is that his gubernatorial term still has another two years to go, so he's not sacrificing anything to take a stab at the Senate - except possibly a great deal of re-election credibility.