The Needle & the Bernie Done

The online Clinton cult and, more recently, its KHive variant hold as articles of faith various talking-points programmed into them by Hillary Clinton, her underlings and her big-platform supporters. This writer has dubbed them "the Clinton Cult Rules," and these, a substitute for independent research or judgment, are endlessly parroted, day after day for years now, across social media. One holds that progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is just a blowhard who has never accomplished anything, accompanied by reference to a sparse number of bills Sanders has sponsored in congress that have been passed into law, usually with a dismissive reference to "naming post-offices." The attack is often expanded to include other progressive pols. Another is that Sanders "steals" ideas and tries to take credit for them--also regularly expanded to other progressives.

In a Twitter discussion last Summer, this writer pointed out that Sanders was responsible for mainstreaming the idea of a $15 minimum wage indexed to inflation and making it a part of the Democratic party platform, and those were the responses thrown at it, two twitterers even trying to give Hillary Clinton credit for the idea. This led me to launch a new thread intended to briefly set the record straight on the subject. I've decided to adapt it, slightly expand it, here.

The Clintonite objections from which I was working:

It's an article of faith among the Clinton cult that Bernie Sanders "steals" ideas in general and "stole" ideas from Hillary Clinton in particular. This is premised on an utterly bizarre notion of intellectual property in public policy that, if put to right, alone discredits it. No one holds any such property, that anyone ever could is a silly idea and, in any event, anyone who wants to see a policy enacted is delighted to see other people adopt and push for it. But it's also false on its own terms.

Clinton fed this nonsense in her revisionist 2017 book, "What Happened," wherein she claimed Sanders took ideas from her, offering bigger, more costly, less, in her characterization, realistic "magic abs" versions of things she'd proposed first. The reality, of course, is that Clinton spent that entire campaign following Sanders around, proposing awful, watered-down-to-nothing versions of whatever he'd proposed first, then triangulating against his, characterizing them as unrealistic pie-in-the-sky, hers as more "doable." I documented this in some detail when reviewing Clinton's false claim, which had appeared in excerpts of the book she'd leaked to the press in advance of its release.

The indexed $15 minimum wage was just another example of this. The idea prominently emerged from the progressive activist base in 2012. Sanders began calling for it at least as far back as Dec. 2014. He made the proposal a central feature of his presidential campaign, right from his his first major event in May 2015.

"Let us be honest and acknowledge that millions of Americans are now working for totally inadequate wages. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage and must be raised. The minimum wage must become a living wage--which means raising it to $15 an hour over the next few years--which is exactly what Los Angeles recently did--and I applaud them for doing that. Our goal as a nation must be to ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty."

At her first campaign event in June 2015--with Sanders on the record for months supporting $15--Clinton offered, as a throwaway line, "raising the minimum wage is a family issue," but didn't suggest any figure or even concretely propose raising the wage.

On 22 July, 2015, Sanders introduced legislation in the Senate to enact an indexed $15 minimum wage by the year 2020.

Eight days later, following her usual practice of peddling Diminished Sanders, Clinton, endorsed a bill in congress that provided for a $12/hour wage. She still had made no proposal herself but was already triangulating against Sanders':

"Let's not just do it for the sake of having a higher number out there," she said. "But let's get behind a proposal that actually has a chance of succeeding."

It wasn't until November 2015--many months after Sanders had introduced the indexed $15 into the campaign and at least 11 months after he'd first proposed it--that Clinton offered a concrete minimum wage proposal: raising the wage to only $12.

Clinton spent the next several months pushing $12, arguing that, while localities could raise the min. wage higher if they wanted, a $15 federal min. wage was too high, and she was opposed to it.

Clinton offered friendly tweets to the Fight For 15 campaign. Leaked Dem emails later revealed the cynical calculation that went into this, Clinton trying to reap the political benefit of siding with F415 without actually endorsing its goal--the $15.

Clinton continued pushing $12 and triangulating against Sanders' $15 but Sanders was winning the argument. From Feb. 2016:

"But instead of embracing $15, Mrs. Clinton fights on for $12, saying that states could set their own, higher minimums. That is cold comfort. Experience has shown that without a robust federal minimum, state minimums also tend to be inadequate. Today, 21 states still do not have minimums higher than the federal level, and of the 29 that do, none have minimums high enough to cover local living expenses for an individual worker.

"Worse, Mrs. Clinton’s stance misses the big picture, which is that the risk in keeping the minimum too low is bigger than the risk of raising it too high. One reason a third of Americans today live in or near poverty is that many jobs in the United States do not pay enough to live on. This is due in part to the steady erosion in the minimum wage--even as labor productivity, corporate profits and executive compensation have gone up. A raise to $12 an hour in 2022, or a mere $24,000 a year for a full-time job, would only lock in that dynamic. Even a $15 minimum works out to only $31,000 a year."

Clinton was eventually battered down on the issue, then, under pressure in an April 2016 debate with Sanders, she completely reversed course; within a few sentences, she abandoned the view she'd advocated throughout the entire campaign.

"At a Democratic debate, [Clinton] was asked if she, as president, would sign a $15 minimum wage if congress passed it. 'Well, of course I would,' she insisted, and then offered a master-class in multi-mawed mendacity in which she suggested she’d always supported $15. 'That's what I will do as president, go as quickly as possible to get to 15… [I]f we have a Democratic congress, we will go to 15!"

That's the first time Clinton supported--or apparently supported--a $15 federal minimum wage.

And, of course, as soon as that debate wrapped, her campaign immediately began prevaricating on the issue.

When the Dems began writing their 2016 platform, Clinton's surrogates would support only vague language saying the party hoped to "raise and index the minimum wage," with only an implication of $15.

Sanders' surrogates introduced language making unambiguous the platform's support for the indexed $15. This drew wild applause from the assembled audience but Clinton's delegates voted it down.

Sanders' delegates carried on, taking the fight to the full platform committee, which--in an absolutely remarkable move--overruled Clinton, sided with Sanders and made $15 the official position of the Democratic party.

The effectiveness of Sanders' advocacy on the $15 min. wage can be seen in the congressional support for it. When, in July 2015, Sanders introduced legislation to accomplish it, it drew only 5 co-sponsors. MN Rep. Keith Ellison introduced the mirror legislation in the House at the time; it drew 56 co-sponsors.

In 2017, after Sanders' presidential campaign, Sanders and Patty Murray reintroduced his 2015 bill in the Senate. This time, it drew 31 co-sponsors--more than 2/3 of the Senate Dem caucus. In the House, VA Rep. Bobby Scott introduced the mirror legislation; support from it had risen from 56 co-sponsors to 171--88% of the House Dem caucus.

The most recent version of Sanders' "Raise the Wage Act" was introduced in 2021 and now has 37 Senate co-sponsors (74% of the Senate caucus); the House mirror, introduced by VA Rep. Bobby Scott, now has 202 (over 90% of the House caucus), and 14 states and many more localities have enacted legislation that has raised (or will raise) their min. wage to $15. Joe Biden won the presidency supporting the policy and has already enacted it for federal employees.

That's the story of how Bernie Sanders moved the needle and, despite Hillary Clinton's furious opposition and extended efforts to undercut him, dragged the Democrats into making support for the indexed $15 minimum wage the official position of the party.

It's also an illustration of why Clinton cult smears of Sanders as an unaccomplished do-nothing so badly miss the boat (and, in fact, miss the entire ocean).[1] While I was adapting my Twitter thread into this article, I wanted to include some polling data on this matter, which I was convinced would show public support for the policy growing alongside Sanders' advocacy of it, but if there was any polling on it during that 2016 Democratic primaries, I've been unable to find it.[2] The oldest poll I could find that even asked about it was a a Pew Research poll from August 2016, many months after Sanders had left the presidential race.[3] Up until mid-2015, in fact, pollsters were only asking about a $10.10 wage. That's how ahead-of-the-curve Sanders was. That's something Sanders does: he takes up forward-looking progressive policies when they're virtually unimaginable inside our conservative, donor-driven political system and, taking on the burden of the scorn of others who, when they're novel, dismiss them as loopy, champions them until they go mainstream. He'll deserve some recognition for it when those policies are eventually passed into law but before that, he's merely been leading the way,

--j.

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[1] In 2016, Clinton and her campaign were smearing Sanders as having accomplished little, pointing to the fact that 2 of the 3 bills Sanders has written that had been passed into law up until then involved naming post-offices. This entirely ignored Sander's' extensive record of passing changes via amendments (and ignored the fact that, by that standard, Clinton herself had, during her time in the Senate, only had 3 bills become law, none of them of any consequence), but it's also an effort to exploit public ignorance of how congress works. Sanders is no slacker when it comes to legislation. Over his years in the House then the Senate, he's credited as the author of 1,035 pieces of legislation. As a practical matter though, the congressional leadership controls what bills are considered, hashed out and brought to a floor vote. Sanders has worked under multiple leadership regimes from both parties and the one thing all of those regimes had in common was opposition to the kind of progressive reform Sanders advocates.

[2] Back in Jan. 2016, Mitch Clark and I had assembled an article on polling regarding Sanders' major issues, showing most were quite popular, but we could find no polls up to then that had asked about $15; we had to rest the case, in that instance, on polls that asked about a smaller minimum wage hike.

[3] In it, 58% expressed support for $15. In a Marist poll released on 23 Feb., 2023, that's up to 64%.