Democrats Shouldn't Be Scared to Talk About Inequality

BY ALEC MACGILLIS

Last week, the centrist Democratic group Third Way caused quite a dustup with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal warning Democrats against pursuing the populist path forged by Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio. Now into the breach comes another commentator urging caution on the party. In Tuesday’s Washington Post, columnist Chuck Lane (a former editor of this magazine) argues that it would be politically unwise for President Obama and the Democrats to focus on income inequality, which Obama last week called “the defining challenge of our time.” Lane writes:

Lane is certainly right: la France, we are not. But his brusque advisory against talking about inequality merits a closer look. For starters, public opinion on this subject is more mixed than he suggests. As he himself notes, polling is quite strongly in favor of raising the minimum wage, which is, for the moment, the policy proposal that the Democrats’ income inequality rhetoric most often tends to focus on. And it’s not just polling: voters in New Jersey by a wide margin recently approved raising their state’s minimum wage to $8.25 over the opposition of the popular governor they re-elected the same day. Meanwhile, in Kentucky, Mitch McConnell’s Democratic challenger, Alison Lundergan Grimes, no flaming liberal, has made raising the state’s $7.25 minimum wage a central plank of her campaign, surely realizing the resonance this could have among low-income white voters who might otherwise be inclined to vote Republican or not at all. Raising the minimum wage is so popular with voters, in fact, that it’s been plausibly suggested that some Democratic elected officials around the country are opposed to indexing the legal minimum to inflation precisely so that they have the opportunity every few years to vote for increases themselves.

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115882/inequality-democrats-should-campaign-against-it