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Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. This is the last day of September,

Thursday, September 30th, 2021. I'm John Fowler. It's the editor of Commentary Magazine,

with me as always executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, John.

Senior writer Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John.

An associate editor, Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah. Hi, John. Okay, guys, it's Thursday. It's the 30th

of September. We were told at the end of last week that there would be a vote

today in the House on the hard infrastructure bill that was supposed to be voted on on Monday,

but that is not the most interesting thing that's happening here. The most interesting thing that's

happening here is that the Biden presidency and the argument of the Democratic Party that it

would restore normalcy and normality and a sense of proportion to American politics and the wake

of Donald Trump, all these ideas are hanging by a thread and the reality is beginning to set in,

I note, on Twitter with liberals that the fantasy that they had indulged in of the new new deal,

or the new new society, or whatever is simply not going to happen, the swing vote in the Senate,

one of the two swing votes in the Senate, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, literally said yesterday

afternoon that it would be fiscal insanity to pass the $3.5 trillion budget bill that the progresses

in the House want to pass fiscal insanity. That bill is dead. He took, he said it before, he wrote

an op-ed in which he said he wouldn't vote for it. He said a month before the op-ed, he wouldn't vote for it.

He basically took a gigantic carving knife and carved the heart out of the progressive fantasy

yesterday. It is fiscal insanity. What's going on here? I got one number to cite to you and then we

can have a general conversation. That number is 18,000. 18,000 is the number of votes

that represented the margin of Joe Manchin's victory in the West Virginia Senate race in 2018.

...