I like the insane belief many people have that people like Manchin and the old Blue Dogs were politically incorrect yet economically populist types who wanted an expansion of New Deal programs unlike those evil shill ring wing neoliberal effette obama dems who only care about PMC feels. This is a belief that can be quickly rectified, by um, looking at the voting record of the blue dogs.
I didn’t mean to suggest that Manchin is to the left of Obama ecomomically. I also don’t understand why Atlas thinks it’s impossible for someone to be for Obamacare but against abortion.
I mean, yeah, it's possible, but practically speaking there are very few actual socially conservative economic leftists around (especially in the atlas understood variant). They were the wreckers during the obamacare era! People like Max Baucus and Ben Nelson were essentially right wing shills, not the William Jennings Bryan radicals people hold dear in their imaginations.
Manchin’s own shift on Obamacare is telling. In his 2010 campaign, he promised to repeal “the bad parts of Obamacare”, but in 2018, with the ACA having proven to be far more popular in areas like WV than it seemed in 2010, he ran on a full-throated defence of it.