Several tweets tell the story. I’m not saying it’s the whole story, but part of it …

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA https://t.co/AJQGYrZjGY

Jennifer 'pro-voting' Rubin @JRubinBlogger

Democrats had no leverage over Joe Manchin and yet they spent a year trying to bully him anyway
Say what you want about Mitch, this is a mistake he’d never make

It does appear that the GOP’s theory of the case in passing the infrastructure bill - that it would make passage of BBB less likely, not more - has been validated. Moral: even congressional GOP isn’t wrong all the time, despite what it seems like. https://t.co/cxxwvD3gbL

Josh Kraushaar @HotlineJosh
Manchin had some pretty blatantly obvious reasons for digging in his heels that have little to do with McConnell's 4-dimensional chess machinations:
https://twitter.com/robertblizzard/status/1472576579020767233
Mitch hasn't exactly established himself as a fighter on behalf of the middle class American in this congress. Why hasn't Turtle slowed down the Senate to a crawl like Schumer did to Trump? The GOP Senate has been playing the obsolete collegiality rubberstamp nominee game after four years of the Dems torching every one of Trump's. Only the most wildly insanely radical nominees have been stopped--and only after it was already clear that Biden had screwed his own pooch. Biden has the worst polling numbers in history and we're supposed to praise McConnell for playing the long game? The GOP leadership has given Zhou its only lifelines.
But even the skinny infrastructure is sparse on actual infrastructure. Now if increase to debt ceiling can be used next year as a down payment on the border wall…