Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) last week made the White House a concrete counteroffer for its spending bill, saying he would accept a $1.8 trillion package that included universal prekindergarten for 10 years, an expansion of Obamacare, and hundreds of billions of dollars to combat climate change, three people familiar with the matter said.

But Manchin’s counteroffer excluded an extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit the administration has seen as a cornerstone of President Biden’s economic legacy, the people said, an omission difficult for the White House to accept in the high-stakes negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door deliberations.

Manchin’s private proposal to the White House — the details of which have not been previously reported — was made just days before a spectacular public collapse in negotiations between the White House and the West Virginia senator, marked by bitter and personal recriminations that left the status of the talks unclear.

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But it remains possible that the administration and Manchin could still reengage in talks, as common ground remains between the sides. While the precise details of Manchin’s offer remain unclear, it adheres to his repeated demand that Democrats fund for 10 years its economic programs — rather than reduce their top line cost by only funding them for a few years, people familiar with the matter said.

Yet there’s another interpretation of Manchin’s comments, and of the past few months of Build Back Better developments, where Manchin has been the consistent one — and the problem is that Democrats haven’t been willing to make the compromises necessary to win him over.

From progressives’ perspective, they have been constantly making concessions to Manchin on Build Back Better all year: dropping their signature climate program from the bill, agreeing to drop paid leave, and significantly shrinking the bill’s overall size down from $3.5 trillion over 10 years.

But Manchin argues that, actually, they’ve changed very little. The bill remains a grab bag of practically all of Democrats’ domestic policy agenda, or at least everything that Senate rules will allow to pass through the budget reconciliation process. Democrats did drop some proposals, but the main device they used to lower the cost was to set programs to expire after just a few years (or even one year).

Manchin told Baier that, across the bill’s various versions, it was “basically the same amount of things that they were trying to accomplish.” He added, “If you’re going to do something, pick what our prized priorities are — like most people do in their families or their businesses — and you fund them for 10 years. And you make sure they deliver the services for 10 years. It’s hard to deliver service for one year or two years or five years.”