Did you hear that Kshama Sawant, Seattle’s socialist city council member, taped her own response to the president’s State of the Union address?
Here’s some of what she had to say:
“The facts are, we’re facing right now a divided America when it comes to the economy. The top 1 percent earned a higher share of the national income than any year since 1928.”
Wait, sorry … that wasn’t Sawant. That was Ted Cruz, the Tea Party senator from Texas, talking on Fox News. I don’t know how he slipped in here.
Back to Sawant: “Under Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse, and there are more people in poverty than ever before.”
Oops, that wasn’t Sawant either. It was that old shape-shifter, Mitt Romney. So here is Sawant, responding to the president:
“While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.”
Weird. That was Jeb Bush.
I do make stuff up sometimes just to keep you readers on your toes. Not this time. Those are real quotes from the top GOP candidates for president — sounding strangely like our own Kshama Sawant. Now, Sawant really did do a 10-minute rebuttal of the president (presumptuous for a city council member, but she is one of the few elected socialists in the nation.) She bashed Obama because he was elected “to represent the millions, not the millionaires.” Bottom line: She wasn’t much more strident about the evils of the gap between rich and poor than these whiplash-causing Republicans.
That the GOP is now tilting at the 1 percent is one of the more remarkable messaging flip-flops of all time. Not long ago, someone saying what Ted Cruz is now saying would have been accused by Ted Cruz of engaging in class warfare.
Most of this change is just political necessity. The old line that Obama’s dictatorial regulations and taxes were wrecking businesses was so obviously not true, what with the job market partying like it’s 1999. They had to come up with something new.
Political tell
But the direction of the messaging shift is also significant — it’s the first big political tell of the 2016 elections. Though they just won a resounding election victory in November, Republicans surprisingly are retreating to adopt the other side’s frame on what ails the country — namely, that the economy isn’t working for anybody but the rich.
They will have much different ideas on what to do about it, of course. But faster than you can lick a finger and put it in the wind, the political system seems to be stampeding onto Sawant’s turf.
Why? Well, if there’s one thing politicians are good at, it’s poll-reading.
Take the sea change occurring on just one income-inequality issue, the minimum wage. In November, four of the redder states in the country voted to raise the wage (South Dakota, Nebraska, Arkansas and Alaska). The latter state voted by a 38-point margin to boost its wage to $9.75. That will be the highest state wage in the nation — unless another state beats them to it.
The speed with which the public is racing ahead of the politicians on mandated higher wages is remarkable. Last week a national poll by Hart Research (The Wall Street Journal’s longtime pollster) found that 75 percent of Americans favor raising the national minimum wage, by 2020, to $12 an hour. And an incredible 63 percent favor raising it all the way to $15 an hour.
