If President Obama and his party didn't even try to deliver on their 2008 campaign promise of a minimum wage hike when they had the White House and both houses of Congress on lockdown in 2010 and 2011, what does their sudden rediscovery of the minimum wage mean now, when they know they can move nothing through Congress? Are they and their sheepdogs, the so-called “progressive Democrats” just yanking our chain again?
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| NYC Rally To Raise The Minimum Wage, Oct. 2013 (Photo by The All-Nite Images) |
As a presidential candidate back in 2007 and 2008, Barack Obama promised to ram a hike in the minimum wage through Congress by 2011. Like the president's promises to renegotiate NAFTA and enact labor law reforms to make union organizing possible again, it wasn't one of those high profile pledges he repeated at every opportunity in front of every audience. He didn't have to, that's not the way it works.
If you're a right-leaning Democrat nowadays, here's how it works: you make those kinds of promises before small audiences of labor and poor folks. From that point, it's the job of your sheepdogs, the Democrat “progressives” campaigning for you to keep the herd of your base voters in line by putting those words in your mouth a lot more often, and with a lot more emphasis than you actually place upon them. Promises are promises, after all, and promises made by the wealthy and powerful to the poor and powerless are worth exactly nothing.
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