Joe Manchin is hoping there’s never a bad time to promote Joe Manchin
Forget holding up his party’s major policy agenda. The guy’s apparently got a book to sell!
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin is a busy guy these days. The ostensible Democrat has got protesters to ignore, protesters to run over with his fancy supercar, other protesters to ignore but this time from the deck of his yacht, plus his own party’s signature domestic agenda thingy to derail.
Yes, Manchin sits at the center of a veritable whirlwind of political posturing and power-playing — the sort of all-consuming time-suck that would humble a lesser person, but which seems to just be the appetizing dish for the senator’s apparent main course: selling the public (and specifically, the book-reading part of the public) on how great and important he, Joe Manchin, really is.
According to Mother Jones’s David Corn, Manchin has peppered the past few weeks of intense jockeying (read: sabotaging) over the just-passed $1 trillion infrastructure bill and the still-in-limbo “Build Back Better” plan championed by President Biden with multiple conversations with a suite of advisers and agents about ... how best to land himself a book deal. Per Corn:
The project has reached the stage of a book proposal being drafted. Manchin has discussed whether the best time to present a proposal to publishers would be during the ongoing drama over the Build Back Better legislation or after a final deal is reached.
Hmmmmmm. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Specifically, makes you think whether Manchin — who has a net worth somewhere in the $4 to $12 million range — has his priorities straight. Or, perhaps more accurately: It makes you think whether we, the general public, are expecting a little too much from someone who has acutely shown a total disinterest in actually representing his constituency. Consider, if you will, the likelihood that a Manchin book deal could net the already wealthy senator hundreds of thousands — if not millions — more in income. Fellow Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), for instance, raked in a $625,000 book advance from Henry Holt and Company in 2015, on top of a $1.15 million payment from publisher Harper Collins in 2014, and more than half a million the year before that. Sen. Bernie Sanders similarly earned almost $900,000 in 2016 from book royalties. Clearly, the nexus of “senator” and “author” can a lucrative one.
Frequently, politicians turn to publishing to help raise their national profile ahead of, or even in the midst of, a run toward higher office. Sometimes, however, writing a book can just be a way to make some easy cash for someone who has shown that while the buck may not stop with him, he’s more than willing to stop for a quick buck.
