Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine is, rightly, alarmed. “Even if Manchin doesn’t want to destroy Biden’s presidency,” he writes, “he may do so by setting off a vortex of failure he loses the ability to escape.”

Think about that—the fate of Biden’s presidency, or at last huge pieces of his domestic agenda, depends on a senator representing a Trump state who is largely immune to pressure from the national party, indeed may be helped if the national party calls him names for not going along with its priorities.

Even if Manchin doesn’t end up, deliberately or inadvertently, tanking the spending, Biden is going to have to devote a lot of time to grappling with his party’s highest profile moderate, who will be constantly making the case that the president’s current spending plans are too costly and irresponsible.

When all is said and done, Biden may get enough spending to allow Republicans to attack him as a wastrel and not enough spending to excite his own partisans, who have been primed to expect a Bernie Sanders-level budget.