Maybe this is more a reflection of how talking-pointy everything has become, that discussions of policy initiatives don't even bother to pretend anymore that they're really about policy. Still, since we've established pretty clearly that the New York Times is the de facto house organ of the Democratic Party, it gets your attention when they report with no apparent sense of embarrasment that this whole minimum wage business nothing more than politics. And they do!
Democratic Party leaders, bruised by months of attacks on the new health care program, have found an issue they believe can lift their fortunes both locally and nationally in 2014: an increase in the minimum wage.
The effort to take advantage of growing populism among voters in both parties is being coordinated by officials from the White House, labor unions and liberal advocacy groups.
In a series of strategy meetings and conference calls among them in recent weeks, they have focused on two levels: an effort to raise the federal minimum wage, which will be pushed by President Obama and congressional leaders, and a campaign to place state-level minimum wage proposals on the ballot in states with hotly contested congressional races.
With polls showing widespread support for an increase in the $7.25-per-hour federal minimum wage among both Republican and Democratic voters, top Democrats see not only a wedge issue that they hope will place Republican candidates in a difficult position, but also a tool with which to enlarge the electorate in a nonpresidential election, when turnout among minorities and youths typically drops off.
Say, aren't "wedge issues" horrible when Republicans deploy them? Ah, never mind . . .
I wrote about this recently at the state level in my Detroit News column. Former Congressman Mark Schauer looks to be the presumptive Democrat nominee for governor in Michigan, which gives him the unenviable task for running during a year when he will surely be asked several hundred times to explain his vote for ObamaCare. So Schauer already got started a few weeks back checking the raise-the-minimum-wage box.
No matter where Democrats run around demanding this, they're doing exactly what the New York Times today slips up and admits they're doing, which is trying to paint Republicans as horrible haters of the middle class so they can escape having to actually solve the problems their ill-advised policies have created.
By the way, the substantive rejoinder to their minimum wage hike demand is that wages are agreements between private parties and the private parties in question don't need the government to help them decide what their agreements will consist of. If anyone thinks arrangements between employers and employees are better when the government butts in to them, I would refer you to ObamaCare, which is the very thing Democrats hope to avoid talking about with the minimum wage nonsense.
