With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Payne Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here! Have a tip? Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. If you want to understand the conundrum that Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) currently poses to JOE BIDEN’s presidency it’s helpful to relive the ballad of one JOSEPH ISADOR LIEBERMAN. Twelve years ago, Lieberman, then an Independent senator from Connecticut, was playing the role that Manchin is now: the centrist-minded, caucusing Democrat proving maddeningly intractable on the party’s key issue. The issue, at the time, was health care reform. And as the year 2009 came to a close, Lieberman was insistent that he’d oppose a plan that included a public option for health coverage. So leadership revised the bill, scrapping the public-option and putting in a provision allowing 55-to-64-year-olds to buy into Medicare. The idea seemed fail-proof. Months earlier, Lieberman had written an op-ed endorsing the Medicare expansion proposal. It had been in the party’s platform in 2000, when he was the vice presidential nominee. But when presented with the alternative, Lieberman summarily rejected it. The oped, he insisted, wasn’t actually an endorsement of a Medicare buy-in provision so much as a suggestion. The 2000 Democratic platform wasn’t something he backed, but merely ran on. That moment when Lieberman stuck his thumb yet again into the eye of the Democratic Party resonates today. Manchin has spent the past few weeks publicly detailing all the ways he’s uncomfortable with what his party is doing. He said he’s not willing to pass a Democrat-only infrastructure bill — despite labeling infrastructure a massive need. He’s repeated his opposition to reforming the filibuster — despite having embraced modest reforms in the past. And he’s re-affirmed his “no” vote on a massive voting and campaign finance overhaul — despite co-sponsoring a version of it last Congress. So what can Biden do? Well… not much. A source close to Manchin says the senator would absolutely bristle at being bullied into backing these bills. And officials close to the White House say Biden very much feels the same way; which explains why he and his team have mounted barely any pressure on the senator and quickly backtracked the one time they did. “You manage it as you manage your personal friendships,” was the advice former White House chief of staff Bill Daley gave, “not as a business.” Those who have been in the position that Manchin now occupies say that a soft touch is more effective anyway. “It’s a very lonely place to be,” said former Sen. MARK PRYOR, a conservative Democrat from Arkansas and West Wing Playbook reader (ahem). “You’re a member of a party and every other member of your party is upset with you. And the other party loves you for this one moment but they don’t really love you. You’re pretty much standing there on your own.” Pryor said the solution to the current standoff wasn’t elegant or creative, but practical. Democrats will end up needing to drop some provisions from the voting rights bill, or trim their ambitions on infrastructure, so that Manchin can sell West Virginians on the concessions he scored. The sooner the party grapples with that, the better, Pyror added. What was more interesting was the parable Pyror offered to explain Manchin’s current thinking. It involved Robert Byrd, the former Senate majority leader whose seat Manchin now occupies. “I remember Byrd one time told a story about how he’d worked with a senator who had said, ‘I worked under four administrations,’” Pryor recalled. “And Byrd corrected him. ‘You didn’t work under any administration. You worked alongside them.’ And that was my view too. The president is elected. But, at the end of the day, you’re elected too.” When Lieberman rejected a Medicare buy-in proposal 12 years ago, Democrats were livid. Party leaders had already resisted calls to strip him of his committee assignments after he backed JOHN McCAIN in the 2008 election. Now, there was a perception that President BARACK OBAMA was catering more to a one-time turncoat than his allies on the left. Obama knew this, felt powerless about it, and found the conundrum, ultimately, quite solvable. He chose to cater. “I found the whole brouhaha exasperating,” Obama wrote in his memoir. “‘What is it about sixty votes these folks don’t understand?’ I groused to my staff. Should I tell the thirty million people who can’t get covered that they’re going to have to wait another ten years because we can’t get them a public option?” Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you JOE LIEBERMAN? 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