Manchin’s ‘no’ is a chance for Biden to return to his campaign promise of bipartisan reconciliation.

Democrats blame Sen. Joe Manchin for sinking their ship by announcing he’ll oppose the Build Back Better bill. They should give him credit for saving them, and the nation, from themselves. Now that they’ve failed to bully him, they should take his concerns seriously and do the hard work of holding hearings, convincing the public, and enacting reforms one step at a time through regular order.

President Biden is to blame for their predicament. Mr. Biden won the Democratic nomination by not being Bernie Sanders, won the White House by not being Donald Trump, and promptly tried to govern as if he had a mandate for Sanders-style policies. “Nobody elected him to be FDR,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Virginia Democrat elected in 2018, said of Mr. Biden after her state’s voters trounced their party in November. “They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”