Stinkin' thinkin'…

One of the few bright spots in the passage of the Iraq supplemental was the inclusion of minimum wage legislation. The lowest paid workers in our country will get seventy cents this summer, and eventually a $2.10 raise altogether. That's genuine cause for Democratic celebration.

You'd think.

Not for some, though…

The Democrats should have kept pounding away on the minimum wage issue as a stand alone issue. Keep forcing the Republicans to filibuster it. Making them pay at the polls for their unpopular position. Wrapping it into the funding bill was like handing them a get-out-of-jail-free card.

That kind of thinking is, sadly, too common on our side. But that's exactly the kind of thinking that the Republicans pursued throughout their majority. They continually put forward legislation with the expectation that its failure would inflame their base, and over and over again their policy of provacative failure produced political success. They couldn't even pass budgets, let alone their whacked out social agenda, but they maintained their strategic advantage in attack ad fodder.

Democratic issues like the minimum wage, though, are just too important to too many people to be used as chips in a similar game.

We're better than they are, at least at basic governance on behalf of the people. That's the whole point. That's why, after all these years and the frustrations and disappointments those years have brought, I'm still a Democrat.

Nope, whatever you think of the supplemental, winning, in any way necessary, on the minimum wage was a Democratic promise, a Democratic obligation and, finally, a Democratic victory worth celebrating.