Sen. Joe Manchin argued that President Biden has been pressured to move further left politically than most Americans during an interview with NBC anchor Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" Sunday.
"He’s been pushed to the far-left," Manchin said of Biden.
"And that far-left is not, basically, where the country is," he continued. "And the far-right is not where the country is. Coming back to the middle, then we can continue to bring people to the middle and do our job."
Manchin has postured himself as a centrist Democratic leader in a party that has become increasingly defined by figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a member of the so-called progressive "Squad" in Congress.
When asked about "No Labels," a third party political group that according to its website claims to represent the "commonsense majority" of middle of the road Americans, Manchin agreed that it was important for politicians to remember that there is a middle ground.
"What the movement of No Labels has done, which I think has been admirable, is saying there is a middle," Manchin said.
"There’s more people in the silent majority of the middle that have no voice whatsoever, so they’re forced to their respective corners, far-left and far-right. They’re not comfortable there. They’re showing that now there’s a place in the middle. And if the middle can show, ‘You can’t go to the left, you’re not going to get elected and you’re not going to govern from there, decisions are made from the middle.’"
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Manchin also spoke out on the debt deal, applying the same "middle" of the road principles. "Don’t you think that we should have a risk evaluation of where we are as a country on finances?" he asked Todd.
"Stay in that middle and pull people back to the middle," Manchin said.
Biden signed the debt deal on Saturday after Republicans and Democrats battled for weeks in Congress over the agreement.
Texas Republican Chip Roy, a deficit hawk, referred to the deal as a "turd sandwich."
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"Passing this budget agreement was critical. The stakes could not have been higher," Biden said from the Oval Office on Friday evening. "Nothing would have been more catastrophic," he said, than defaulting on the country’s debt.
"No one got everything they wanted, but the American people got what they needed," Biden said, highlighting the "compromise and consensus" in the deal. "We averted an economic crisis and an economic collapse."
Notably, Manchin successfully pushed for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the debt deal. He said that West Virginia will benefit from the 303-mile natural gas pipeline, which he added will "increase domestic energy production."
Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
