cow·ard

noun ˈkau̇(-ə)rd

: someone who is too afraid to do what is right or expected : someone who is not at all brave or courageous

Political

: Someone who runs for office in West Virginia and won’t admit that he supports every word of Obamacare.

Example

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) is a coward.

If you ever listen to Democrats run for office in a red state, you will hear a tortured soul.  They usually parse words and decline to take a stance on any confrontational issue, opting to take both sides or no side at all.  We are seeing this with Alison Lundergan-Grimes in Kentucky.  When forced to utter a word about Obamacare, Grimes will throw out platitudes about some of the law being bad:  “there are many things wrong with it, but instead of trying to repeal it nearly 40 times and wasting our taxpayers’ money, we should be talking about solutions.” [WHAS, Grimes Distances Herself from Obama on Key Issues, 7/18/13] But if you want to know what she would really do were she to win the seat (unless we save the seat by nominating Matt Bevin), look no further than Joe Manchin from West Virginia.

Here is a sampling of his statements and views on Obamacare when running for office in 2010:

“it needs to have a lot of it repealed, (and) if you can’t fix that, repeal the whole thing.” [Daily Athenaeum coverage of 2010 W.V. Senate debate , Oct 18, 2010]

Manchin said he liked certain parts of the health care legislation, such as its requiring insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions, but he opposed the law requiring individuals to buy insurance and most businesses to cover their employees. [Washington Post, W. Va. Senate debate turns into a race to the right, 10/18/2010]

WALLACE: I just want to — I just want to pin you down on this, though. You’re saying now that if you’d known what was really in the bill, although last March you said you’d have voted for it, you now say you would have voted against it?

MANCHIN: Correct. Now, knowing the existence as far as how reaching it had been, as far as an onerous, I would have. And I think many people didn’t know about the bill. It ends up, what, 2,000 pages or more. [FoxNews Sunday, Transcript, 10/24/2010]

Fast forward three years, and Joe Manchin voted against a mere one-year delay of the individual mandate, something he has always said he opposes.  In addition, he voted against eliminating the congressional exclusion.  Instead, he decided to support the #ReidShutdown.

What a fraud and a coward.  Manchin is not man enough to stand before the people of West Virginia and say that he supports every word of Obamacare and the Obama agenda; it’s just that he needs to temper his language in order to win in a conservative state.

The days of moderate Democrats are long gone.

Cross-posted from The Madison Project