“A Major Issue In The 2016 Elections”: Walker Dismisses Minimum Wage As ‘Lame’
Just a few weeks before his re-election bid, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was asked whether minimum-wage laws should even exist. The Republican governor replied, “Well, I’m not going to repeal it but I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it serves a purpose.”
Seven months later, shortly after kicking off his GOP presidential campaign, Walker went just a little further. The Washington Post reported:
Scott Walker appeared to take aim at the national minimum wage on Monday evening, referring to it as one of many “lame ideas” pushed by Democrats.
Walker’s comment came in a lengthy interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity immediately following a speech formally announcing his entrance into the 2016 presidential race. Walker said the next president needs to speak the language of the industrial Midwest and connect with the working class.
According to the video, eagerly disseminated by Democratic officials, Walker told the Fox News host, “The left claims that they’re for American workers and they’ve just got just really lame ideas – things like the minimum wage.”
In context, there was nothing to suggest the governor was talking about his opposition to a minimum-wage increase, so much as the existence of the minimum wage itself. To hear Walker tell it, the law is a “lame” benefit for American workers.
It’s a pretty provocative move for a national candidate – increasing the minimum wage is one of the more popular ideas in the country right now, enjoying broad support for a wide range of voters. Just a month ago, a CBS News poll found 71% of Americans want to see the minimum wage go from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour – and that included a majority of self-identified Republican voters.
The Wisconsin governor, meanwhile, appears to support lowering the minimum wage to $0.
What’s just as interesting is how common this position has become in GOP circles. For decades, the debate was largely limited to those who wanted to raise the minimum wage and those who wanted to leave it unchanged. There were a few folks on the margins opposed to the law itself, but this was a fringe position that few took seriously.
This year, however, a growing number of presidential candidates are practically boasting about their hostility forwards the minimum wage. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), for example, has suggested getting rid of the minimum altogether, arguing it’s not “the government’s business” to interfere with wages. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has said, plainly, “I don’t think a minimum wage law works.”
Earlier this year, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), whom some see as a moderate, went so far as to say, “We need to leave it to the private sector. I think state minimum wages are fine. The federal government shouldn’t be doing this.”
Walker clearly wants to be part of the same club. Expect this to be a major issue in the 2016 elections.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, July 14, 2015
“Trump Proves GOP Proclamations Of Mortal Affront Untrue”: He’s Only Repeating What His Party’s Has Been Saying All Along
In 2006, then-Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce advocated the return of a 1954 program for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. It was called “Operation Wetback.”
In 2010, Sen. David Vitter, Republican from Louisiana, released a campaign ad that depicted a bunch of seedy-looking Mexicans, some with gang bandannas, slipping through a hole in a border fence to invade America.
In 2011, Rep. Mo Brooks, Republican from Alabama, said of undocumented immigrants: “I will do anything short of shooting them” to make them stop “taking jobs from American citizens.”
That same year, Republican presidential contender Herman Cain vowed to build an electrified border fence that would shock Mexicans who sought to slip into the country.
In 2013, Rep. Steve King, Republican from Iowa, said that for every illegal immigrant who becomes a valedictorian, there are another hundred with “calves the size of cantaloupes” because they are drug mules.
Yet the party is shocked and offended by what Donald Trump said? Jeb Bush calls his recent comments on undocumented Mexican immigrants “extraordinarily ugly”? Sen. Marco Rubio finds them “not just offensive and inaccurate, but also divisive”? A major donor tells the Associated Press Trump should be excluded from the debates?
Beg pardon, but there is something rather precious in all this ostentatious umbrage. If you didn’t know better, you might forget that the GOP has sought votes for years by stoking fear and anger toward Mexicans who enter this country illegally. If you weren’t paying attention, you might not know that various Republican officials and pundits routinely characterize those people — most of them just dirt poor and trying to put bread on the table — as a disease-ridden invasion force of drug smugglers and gang members, not to mention pregnant women splashing across the Rio Grande in order to drop so-called “anchor babies” on U.S. soil.
This is not to say Trump’s words were not ugly. They were. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “…They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems [to] us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”
But ugly as it was, Trump’s xenophobia broke no new ground. So you have to wonder at the pious denunciations it is generating. You’re tempted to say people are reacting like this because Trump was blunter than we are used to. On the other hand, there is nothing particularly subtle or ambiguous about threatening to shock Mexicans. Maybe folks weren’t paying attention before.
It’s worth noting that Trump’s comments came as he announced his intention to run for President of the United States, a nation whose last census found about 32 million of us identifying as Mexican-American (some, presumably, good people). Indeed, Mexican-Americans are far and away the largest group under the umbrella rubric “Hispanic.” All the Cuban-, Puerto Rican-, Argentinean-, and Spanish-Americans combined don’t equal the number of Mexican-Americans in this country. So when the GOP talks about “Hispanic” outreach, it is, in a very real sense, talking Mexican-American outreach. Yet this “outreach” seems always to be overshadowed by insult.
The party seems not to realize that you can’t have it both ways, can’t insult people, then ask them to vote for you. How telling is it that, even as party elders assure us his remarks don’t represent the GOP, Trump vaults to second place in the polling of Republican contenders? It’s a truth that gives the lie to these proclamations of mortal affront.
It’s hypocritical and unfair to put all this on Trump. He only repeated what his party’s been saying all along.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, July 8, 2015
“The Mainstream Media’s Bernie Sanders Trap: Deranged Clinton Hate Turns Them Into America’s Socialist Vanguard
If only the great Michael Harrington had lived to see this. So many brave Americans fought in vain to spread socialism in the United States, but it’s advancing in the summer of 2015 thanks to an unlikely vanguard: lazy and apolitical political reporters who love horse races and hate the Clintons.
Yes, the MSM is making sure that socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is taken seriously in his uphill run against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. He’s surging in Iowa and New Hampshire, polls tell us, and attracting 10,000 people at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Wednesday night.
This lifelong lefty who attended Madison is thrilled to see it – and yet a little cynical, too.
I mean really, folks: If Sanders had a chance to become president, Mark Halperin would be the first in line to red-bait him, rather than shaming Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Clinton supporter, into doing it on Morning Joe.
But the rise of Sanders, alongside that of the GOP’s surging star, blustering racist Donald Trump, also shows the media the difference between the ideological moorings of the folks who make up the Democratic and Republican base. The Democrats have a lot of lefties, FDR Democrats, folks who want single payer health insurance, people who think we can learn from Western Europe not stigmatize it — and yes, Sanders excites them. On the GOP side, there is a loud, large, angry segment of the GOP base that’s frankly xenophobic, nativist, even racist. Trump speaks to them.
Sanders and Trump thus offer different kinds of challenges to their party rivals. So far only George Pataki has tried to galvanize a Trump backlash, while Sen.Ted Cruz has defended him. Jeb Bush has said nothing, so far, which is a little weird, given that his wife is Mexican and his kids are of Mexican descent. But Trump is a stand-in for that portion of the GOP base — and these guys haven’t been terribly courageous in rebuking the nativist, racist element in their base. So they apparently think they have to be careful in the way they treat Trump, too. Of course, whoever gets the nomination may regret cozying up to Trump and his extremism, if they do so, when they get to a general election.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton can afford to welcome Sanders’ candidacy, and even endorse a lot of his platform. As Jim Newell points out here, she’s enormously popular even among Sanders supporters in Iowa. And Sanders isn’t the polarizing figure that Trump is. He’s good for the Democratic Party — and for socialism too. He explains it in simple terms. He points to the strong, social democratic economies of Western Europe, not the USSR. And his rising popularity shows that millennials and other voters too young to remember the Cold War aren’t going to be red-scared away from Sanders because of the socialist label.
Meanwhile, as Republicans compete to see who can abolish Obamacare most cruelly, Democrats will be debating whether the system should move to a single payer approach. This is all great.
Now, if Clinton endorses too much of what Sanders supports, you can bet that media figures hailing the Vermont senator’s campaign today will be red-baiting him, and Clinton, when the fall of 2016 comes around. That’s how they roll. So progressives should be a little wary of the media’s Bernie-mentum. The Clinton-hate that inspires admiring Sanders takes today will turn him into Clinton’s problem once she defeats him for the nomination, as she almost certainly will. Still, it’s fun to see the MSM so excited about socialism. Michael Harrington would be smiling.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, July 2, 2015
“A Reality-Show Version Of An Actual Campaign”: Donald Trump; A Farce To Be Reckoned With
Anxiety-ridden GOP masterminds will eventually find a way to solve the Trump Problem. Until they do, however, the Republican Party threatens to become as much of a laughingstock as what David Letterman used to call “that thing on Donald Trump’s head.”
Suddenly, according to recent polls, the iconically coiffed mogul has to be taken . . . how, exactly? Obviously it’s not possible to take Trump seriously, since there’s nothing remotely serious about him or his “campaign,” which is nothing more than a reality-show version of an actual campaign. But if his poll numbers are going to place him in the top tier of Republican candidates, he can’t be ignored.
Let’s call him a farce to be reckoned with.
A CNN poll released Wednesday found that Trump was favored by 12 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents nationally, putting him in second place behind dynastic scion Jeb Bush, who was at 19 percent. Other recent surveys showed Trump trailing only Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in Iowa and only Bush in New Hampshire.
Trump reacted to his rising political status with typical self-effacement and modesty, saying that “politicians are all talk and no action and the American public is ready for a leader with a proven track record of success.”
Trump’s track record would look a lot better without the corporate bankruptcies, and many doubt he’s worth anything near the $9 billion he claims. But let’s stipulate that he is a wealthy man who inherited a real estate empire from his father and displayed a talent for both making and losing huge amounts of money.
Let’s also stipulate that while Trump can’t win the nomination, he can be a significant factor in the race — and not, for the Republican Party, in anything resembling a good way.
Already, he has sent a clear message to Latino voters, whom GOP strategists desperately want to attract. Go away, Trump tells them; put as much distance between yourselves and this party as you possibly can.
In his announcement speech, which was really more of an extended improvised riff, Trump gave a description of Mexican immigrants that was both chauvinistic and xenophobic. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Note the magnanimity: Trump, a big man, is willing to take it on faith that some immigrants from Mexico are not rapists. He clearly believes that very many are, however. When pressed on the subject by CNN’s Don Lemon, Trump insisted, “Well, somebody’s doing the raping, Don. I mean somebody’s doing it. Who’s doing the raping? Who’s doing the raping?”
Who, indeed? Trump will have some free time to get to the bottom of this mystery because his slurs led NBCUniversal, which has aired his reality show “The Apprentice,” to sever all ties with him and Univision to announce it will no longer carry his Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants. The Macy’s department store chain decided to no longer carry Trump’s line of menswear, which was interesting news to me because I didn’t know he had a line of menswear. Hard to imagine that the combed-over-mogul look was ever a big seller.
But I digress. The point was how Trump had insulted men and women of Mexican heritage. It’s hard to stay focused when writing about him because there is no thread to grasp. Trump professes to know everything about everything and refuses to acknowledge a shred of evidence to the contrary. “I’m right because I say so” pretty much sums up his political philosophy.
But everyone knows who he is, which is more than can be said for many of the hopefuls buried in the GOP scrum. And nobody knows how to draw attention to himself better than Trump. If by some unimaginable fluke he did become president, does anyone doubt he’d try to put his name in big gold letters on the north portico of the White House?
Viewers will tune in to the Republican debates just to see whom Trump insults next. “The Chinese” will come in for a lambasting, of course. Perhaps he will tell us again what a great relationship he has with “the blacks.” Or maybe he will expound on his solutions for the turmoil in the Middle East, which all seem to involve taking other countries’ oil.
The one thing Trump can accomplish is to bring the Republican campaign down to his level. A party that allows such a travesty deserves to lose.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 2, 2015
“The Year Of Telling It Like It Is”: Don’t Tell Us You’re Going To Tell It Like It Is, Just Live It
Less than 24 hours after New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie embarked on a long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination under the banner of “Telling It Like It Is,” Vermont senator and aspiring Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders tweeted, “What this campaign is about is a very radical idea: We’re going to tell the truth.”
Not so radical, actually, in the 2016 race. Practically everybody’s “telling it like it is.” It’s a theme with endless subtextual variations, starting with “Telling It Like I Want It To Be.” “Telling It Like Primary Voters Think It Is.” “Telling It Like A Future Fox News Host.”
Christie’s main claims to this slogan are his blustery persona and call to curb entitlement programs. But that is hardly enough to stand out in a year like this. There are about 20 candidates and many have unfiltered personalities, nothing to lose, or both.
You want blustery? How about Donald Trump? His blithe characterization of Mexican immigrants as rapists, criminals, and drug runners — at his presidential announcement, no less — is the nadir of the telling-it-like-it-is syndrome to date. And it’s costing him what it should financially, as Univision, NBC, and now Macy’s have cut ties with him.
It’s not yet costing him politically; new polls show Trump in second place for the Republican nomination nationally, in Iowa and in New Hampshire. That’s bound to change, but not due to mass condemnation from the GOP. The party’s 2016 candidates for the most part have punted on Trump, perhaps anticipating, hopefully, that he will be ruined without their help. National Review did its part with a report that Trump has skipped the last six presidential primary elections, including 2012, when he urged Florida Republicans via Twitter to get out and vote in theirs.
Few can compete with Trump, but others are going for shock value in their own ways. Former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee, for instance, played the daring, unconventional card by proposing a switch to the metric system — part of the internationalist direction in which he said he’d lead the country. Another Democrat, former Virginia senator Jim Webb, went in a unique direction after the Charleston church massacre. He said on Facebook that the Civil War had a “complicated” history and the Confederate battle flag had “wrongly been used” for racist purposes.
On the GOP side, John Kasich’s history suggests a strong showing in the tell-it-like-it-is sweepstakes when he announces July 21. Politico reported the Ohio governor would “aim to appear less scripted and guarded than the leading candidates.” In fact, he actually IS less scripted and guarded than most of them. To cite one example: Kasich didn’t just circumvent conservatives to jam through a Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, he suggested that they “better have a good answer” when St. Peter asks them what they did for the poor.
So far, Christie’s strongest rival for the tell-it-like-it-is crown is Mr. Establishment himself, Jeb Bush. He made a week-long mess of a question about Iraq, but the Florida governor has been straightforward — almost defiantly so — in other areas.
Not surprisingly, given Bush’s Mexican-American wife, he has been relatively tough on Trump. Asked in Spanish about Trump’s comments about Mexicans at an event in Las Vegas, Bush replied in Spanish that Trump spends his life fighting with people and doesn’t represent the values of the Republican Party, according to Bloomberg News. In English he said that “I don’t agree with him. I think he’s wrong.”
Bush also gets a straight-talk citation for calling the Confederate flag a “racist” symbol — while in South Carolina, no less. In a Winthrop University poll last year, 61 percent — including nearly three-quarters of whites — said the flag should continue to fly on the statehouse grounds. Views are changing, but there’s still risk given the state’s early and influential presidential primary. In 2012, exit polls showed that 98 percent of voters in the GOP primary were white.
On domestic policy, Bush has stuck with his support for Common Core education standards as many other GOP hopefuls have run from them, and he continues to back legal status for many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country as part of a comprehensive immigration solution.
In a private phone call with Alabama Republicans that was reported by The Washington Post, Bush berated fellow Republicans for abandoning their views and said they should not “bend in the wind.” He says similar things in public. “I’m not backing down from something that is a core belief,” he told the Club for Growth in February. “Are we supposed to just cower because at the moment people are all upset about something? No way, no how.”
The old adage of show, don’t tell applies to the 2016 race in spades. Don’t tell us you’re going to tell it like it is. Just live it. And don’t be surprised to find stiff competition for the title.
By: Jill Lawrence, The National Memo, July 3, 2015
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