David M. Shribmanopinion
Two are men, one a woman. Two are rebels, one a moderate. One leans left, another leans right, the third hews to the middle ground. They come from states that represent the geographical diversity of the country: mountains, flatlands, coasts. They served with Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
But now they are gone — three veteran lawmakers, possessed of an unusual mixture of institutional memory and political wisdom who together account for three-fifths of a century on Capitol Hill.
And in their new lives as private citizens, they each personify separate strands of the Democratic Party that, after a thunderous defeat in the November election, is seeking to rebuild itself. With different profiles and perspectives, these three of vastly different backgrounds stand on different political ground but see the landscape remarkably similarly. The country and the Democratic Party are losing their voices, and show few signs of heeding those voices.
Sen. Joe Manchin sat so far on the Democratic right that two Republicans, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, had higher ratings from the Americans for Democratic Action, the customary measure of adhesion to liberal causes, than he did. Sen. Sherrod Brown sat on the Democratic left and has battled for steelworkers and miners his entire career. Rep. Annie McLane Kuster of New Hampshire has been a leader of the centrist New Democrat Coalition.
For years, Manchin tortured President Joe Biden and his Democratic colleagues, holding out for concession after concession when the Democrats held a slender majority in the Senate, consistently winning the opprobrium of the party, occasionally hinting he might challenge Biden for the White House. He routinely told colleagues that he worked for the people of West Virginia and not for the Democratic senatorial caucus. His latest act of rebellion against the president: calling Biden’s blanket pardon of all but three of those on federal death row “horribly misguided and insulting.”
For years, Brown was the leading voice against trade agreements, especially NAFTA, that he regarded as frontal attacks against workers and misguided hobby horses of bicoastal elites and academic economists. He applied a single, unforgiving barometer to congressional legislation: “The role of government was to help the little guy; the big guys can take care of themselves.”
For years, the McLane family of New Hampshire has been at the forefront of the state’s political culture: Kuster’s great-grandfather (a delegate to the 1900 Republican National Convention that renominated William McKinley for president) was a Granite State governor; her father (a Rhodes Scholar and member of the United States Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame) was a mayor of Concord; and her mother (daughter of a Dartmouth dean who as a student kicked a 51-yard field goal against Harvard in 1922 and herself a onetime House candidate) was an influential state senator, much sought after by out-of-state reporters during successive New Hampshire primaries. Both her parents were reflexive Republicans, though her father once ran for governor as an independent and, toward the end of her career, her mother migrated into the Democratic Party, in part because of abortion politics. Kuster’s childhood was marked by family suppers with David Souter, later a Republican president’s appointee to the Supreme Court.
The three — Manchin, Brown and Kuster — never consulted each other on policy. They never had a meal together. The only time they were in a room together was during a joint session of Congress. They see the world so differently that in some regards they see it similarly, much the way Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont sometimes share the same rhetoric.
Weeks before Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, Kuster told me that the vice president would succeed Biden in that role, though she tartly suggested that the little-known governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, might be an interesting alternative. Soon after Biden’s disastrous June debate, Brown told me that he was tortured about the president’s performance and future. When Biden held a one-year celebration of the Inflation Reduction Act, Manchin skipped the event and when, almost exactly a year later, Harris did become the nominee, he steadfastly refused to endorse her.
So what unites these three lawmakers, two of whom (Manchin and Kuster) are retiring and the third (Brown) was defeated for reelection after 32 years on Capitol Hill?
It’s not complicated: Remembering what the Democratic Party stood for when what it stood for was so plain it required no describing.
“My post-Senate goal is to make us what we always were, the party of workers,” Brown said in a recent telephone conversation. “It’s not only the right course morally, it’s the right course politically. But much of working America thinks we talk down to them. We need to be spending more time in union halls and going to picket lines. The diminishing of the Democratic Party with workers began with NAFTA and most-favored-nation status with China. People expect that the Republicans are going to sell out to corporate America. They didn’t expect the Democrats to sell them out.”
Kuster, who is committed to use her new free time to elect moderate Democrats, is not retiring from her effort to shape the party’s future. “We need to listen to where people are politically,” she said in an interview after her final days in Congress. “We need to take seriously the concerns of normal people.”
She pointed to the House candidacy of newly elected Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet, who outperformed Harris in a Michigan district that includes Midland, Saginaw, Bay City and Flint. Her campaign emphasized the price of gas and groceries — just as Republicans, including Trump, did.
Overall, the caucus won three special elections, held 19 Democratic seats and flipped nine seats from Republican to Democrat. No other ideological caucus performed better.
Entering the House as a member of the minority can change lawmakers’ perspectives. It means that they don’t assume their party has the public’s ear — or its support. It makes them hungry to serve in the majority, and it renders them sensitive to the need to listen more widely, perhaps even to listen to these three departing lawmakers, all of whom had served in the majority.
“Our duty is to amplify the voices of the people who we serve,” Brown said in his farewell address. “To be their megaphone, we start by listening.”
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
