Minimum Wage Won’t Save Dems in 2014

[Geee]

Commentary Magazine:

Democrats have had a generally miserable 2013, but they think they have the answer as to how to make 2014 end on a better note for them. Some on the left may still be holding onto the forlorn hope that ObamaCare will somehow magically become transformed from the millstone around their necks to a popular initiative like Social Security or Medicare. But they are thinking clearly about the political impact of the health-care fiasco. Rather than just bang their heads against that wall, Democrats are looking to change the subject. So rather than try and sell skeptical Americans on the dubious idea of increasing the government’s involvement in health care, they appear to be set on convincing the electorate that the key issue facing the country isn’t the looming ObamaCare disaster but the notion of inequality.

 

As the New York Times reported in a front-page feature yesterday, Democrats seem to think provoking a debate about raising the minimum wage is the magic bullet that will slay Republican candidates in a year in which the GOP is generally favored to make midterm gains in Congress if not take back the Senate in November. The minimum wage proposal doesn’t stand alone, as it is part of an effort by the White House to pivot back to the start of 2013 when the president unveiled a laundry list of liberal ideas in his State of the Union speech. The minimum wage was part of a package that was supposed to be the core of the reelected Obama’s second-term program in which income inequality would, along with climate change, gun control, and an expansion of entitlements, herald a sharp left turn in American politics. But while the president is hoping for a mulligan on a 2013 which was marked by scandals at home and foreign-policy disasters like Egypt and Syria abroad, life is rarely that simple. Though the minimum wage seems like a political winner to his strategists, the problem is that while the bully pulpit of the presidency can help set the country’s political agenda, mere strategy can’t divert voters from the impact of problems that affect the lives of large numbers of citizens. Though a pivot left will please the president’s base, it is no match for the havoc that ObamaCare will have on the nation over the course of 2014.