POLITICS OVER POLICY. Like Mike Crowley, I'm pleased to see Hillary Clinton joining Russ Feingold in one of the great nonsensical issues of our time: the fight to connect congressional raises to increases in the minimum wage. On a policy level, this is absurd on its face. If you want to link the minimum wage to something, inflation, the cost of living, increases in productivity, or even CEO salaries all make far more sense. And I'm of the slightly counterintuitive view that congresspeople should be paid far more as is, so I'm not terribly impressed with legislation that would constrain their salaries. But as a political gambit, it's brilliant. It pits the sympathetic worker against the loathed congresscritter, underscores the Republican majority's reprehensible unwillingness to raise the wage above its current 50-year low, and will, by virtue of being a potent political club, make it easier to extract increases and maybe an eventual automatic mechanism in the minimum wage. It's good politics that could lead to good policy, and it's the sort of political savvy that Democrats need to display more often.
--Ezra Klein
