DEAD CENTER: In Defense of Common Sense, by Joe Manchin
Early in Joe Manchin’s new book, “Dead Center,” he describes a “deep, almost compulsive need for order and cleanliness” that was instilled in him at a young age. That urge has stayed with him since, and has led to some unusual behavior: “Every Christmas, after cutting down the tree and tying it to the roof of the car, I’d drive straight to the carwash — with the tree still strapped on top.”
Really? It’s a detail that a more self-deprecating author might play for laughs, but Manchin, the former senator from West Virginia, isn’t that kind of guy. “I don’t try to be funny,” he announces on the first page. “After all these years in Washington, I’m still as plain-spoken as the day is long. Those who know me know how literal I can be.”
Consider yourself warned: Despite its punning title, “Dead Center” turns out to be dead serious. In 2023, Manchin declared he would retire from the Senate at the end of his term, having tussled with the Biden administration by wielding a decisive vote in an evenly divided Senate but refusing to back a swath of the Democratic agenda. For Americans who wonder why Manchin had such a fraught relationship with his own party, he promises that his book will “pull back the curtain” on “the values that shape my resolve.” He repeatedly pays solemn tribute to the virtues of centrism, at least as he defines it: “Good politics transcend party lines.”
Like any seasoned politician, he makes pointed use of the words “humble” and “humility.” At the same time, he wants the reader to know that while Washington descended into partisan warfare, he has never wavered from what he knows to be right. Growing up in the tiny town of Farmington, W.Va., Manchin sold carpets at his father’s furniture shop, and he prides himself on applying his retail skills to government. “Every constituent is a customer,” he writes. “That was how I learned to lead.”
With “Dead Center,” Manchin seeks to burnish his legacy by portraying himself as a high-minded public servant of unshakable conviction. “Those early years shaped my entire worldview,” he writes of his childhood in West Virginia. “My principles don’t swing with the political winds.” The world might change, but he does not: “I am pretty simple in my views. I’m fiscally responsible and socially compassionate.”
And he will always, he says, stand up for coal, a pledge that is a running theme in the book. He gestures at the need to diversify West Virginia’s economy, recalling numerous mine explosions that ravaged local communities, yet he describes coal in almost sacred terms (“the lifeblood of the region and the state”) and derides “the new religion, climate change.” In 2010, when President Obama and House Democrats were proposing cap-and-trade legislation for greenhouse gases, Manchin put out an ad for his Senate campaign featuring him shooting a copy of the bill with a rifle. “It showed people that I wasn’t afraid to stand up to anyone — not even my own party — if it meant protecting West Virginians,” he writes.
He says he founded a coal brokerage business for similarly noble reasons. “When I started Enersystems, I wasn’t just looking for a way to make a living. I was looking for a way to build something that could create jobs, strengthen communities and provide a resource that our country desperately needed.” Enersystems took the waste from coal mines — known as “gob” — and sold it to a single power plant as fuel for electricity.
What Manchin doesn’t say in the book is that according to a New York Times investigation, when he was governor of West Virginia in 2006, he was involved in the passage of a rate increase whose consequence has been significantly higher electricity prices for his constituents.
Instead, Manchin sticks to the simple story of a former salesman who wanted “to show West Virginians what great customer service meant in politics.” He holds fast to truisms, handily boldfaced in the text: “You can always do better,” “Relationships are everything,” “Listen with an open mind, embrace diverse perspectives and lead by bringing everyone to the table.”
Prompted by his devotion to “conversation” and “compromise,” he dedicates a chapter to the filibuster, “The Soul of the Senate,” in which he explains why he refused to modify the filibuster rule even though it prevented Democrats from passing voting rights legislation. “Voting rights should not have been a partisan issue,” he writes, declining to acknowledge that Republicans have made it so. He prefers to complain about “partisan posturing” on “both sides.”
In fact, most of his ire is directed at his fellow Democrats. He says that his state has flipped from blue to red because party leaders “made rural states like West Virginia feel overlooked and undervalued.” He maintains that Obama’s “campaign for clean energy” amounted to a “war on Appalachia and coal.” And he recalls how much he resented Democrats for trying to get him to support President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation and its “entitlement attitude”: “Why should I have to change who I am or what I believe?”
As often as Manchin repeats that he wants “compromise,” the tone of this memoir is indignant. Whenever he recounts his Democratic colleagues’ apparent unwillingness to compromise with him on his terms, he seems especially offended. Yet his preoccupation with bipartisanship has meant that his terms weren’t always clear. A profile of Manchin in The New Yorker noted that his “constant triangulation makes him mercurial.” According to one political adviser, even when Democrats would give Manchin the concrete benefits for West Virginians he demanded, he wouldn’t budge, insisting on more changes in an often vain bid for Republican support.
Manchin says he wanted the Republicans to win the Senate in 2024: “I believed it was the only hope for preserving the Senate as an institution.” It’s a surprising statement to make in the fall of 2025, given the current Republican-controlled Congress’s striking capitulation to the executive branch. Manchin’s commitment to bipartisanship looks, in retrospect, like the political extension of his obsessive neatness. He is so fixated on cleaning his car that the result is a wet Christmas tree.
Yet Manchin, who says he seriously considered a presidential run as an independent in 2024, continues to go straight to the carwash. “I have so much respect for Mitch McConnell,” he writes at one point. “He’s consistently understood the value of the Senate as an institution.”
Is this the same McConnell who bucked Senate precedent and refused to give a Democratic Supreme Court nominee so much as a hearing? Manchin might not be trying to be funny, but he’s got to be kidding me.
DEAD CENTER: In Defense of Common Sense | By Joe Manchin | St. Martin’s | 271 pp. | $32
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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