COMMENTARY

Pull on your boots, boys

Might this be that rarest of years in which Arkansas Democrats can afford to support raising the minimum wage without losing vital business support?

The short answer is yes. The long answer begins now.

Normally, Democratic candidates in Arkansas must do a little dance to sidestep minefields laid by their national party.

The strongest modern-era Arkansas Democrats—Bill Clinton, Mike Beebe, the Pryors, Mike Ross—have tended to be those lightest on their feet, the nimblest, those best with finesse.

So you might think that the national Democratic Party’s emerging and generally wise strategy to push for increasing the minimum wage—to drive favorable turnout in November and deflect the Obamacare debacle—would pose a problem for Arkansas Democrats such as U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, who stands for election to a third term, and gubernatorial candidate Mike Ross.

After all, they are currently challenged to negotiate a long-schizophrenic and newly Republicanizing state. The traditional Democratic winning formula—applied decades ago by Clinton and more recently by Beebe—is first to remain acceptable to the business community, and then, and only then, to limit populist initiatives for poor people to neatly confined and generally unassailable packages.

For example: Beebe’s drawing down over time of the state sales tax on groceries.

Historically the Arkansas political and cultural dynamic has been to oblige chamber of commerce types who say raising the lowest wage paid to workers would hurt employers and cause them not to hire poor folks in the first place.

Arkansas in one of four states with its own minimum wage lower than the national minimum wage. The national wage generally applies in such cases.

So do you remember that reference in the preceding paragraph to our state’s being long-schizophrenic? It’s more like a bipolar disorder, actually. It means we are poor economically and anti-poor politically.

Arkansas is somewhere between the second-poorest and fifth-poorest state in the country. Yet our political inclination has long been to oppose our direct self-interest, or at least to oppose the direct best interests of those people actually mired in the pervasive condition of poverty.

Our traditional minimum-wage aversion—reflected as recently as the last legislative session when a proposal to raise the state minimum wage got buried in committee—is based on a supply-side argument that economic growth flows only from those with money already. To inconvenience those with money is to cause those with money to inconvenience those without, or so the premise goes.

That ignores any demand-side theory that giving poor people more money would cause them … you know … to spend more money as customers of establishments owned by those already with money.

So on Monday, the New York Times reported on the Democrats’ fairly savvy plan: Push a bill in Congress to take the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour while simultaneously encouraging specific state initiatives on the issue in key battleground states such as Arkansas, with the epic Pryor-Tom Cotton battle.

You could energize poor people, who tend to vote Democratic, and snooker Republicans, who don’t want to inconvenience employers with higher payrolls but who don’t want to let the Democrats get away with a popular ploy, either.

The Times reported that a few Democrats in tough races—Pryor prominent among them—hadn’t yet endorsed a higher minimum wage.

As it happens, a coalition of labor and clergy and black groups already has announced a drive for an initiated act in Arkansas to raise the state’s minimum wage via a three-year phase-in. The initiative would take our minimum wage from $6.25 to $8.50 an hour. That is $1.25 higher than the current federal minimum.

And here is an interesting angle: Randy Zook, head of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, was noncommittal last week on the state initiative. He said it might be rendered moot by congressional action in the meantime.

So might Pryor’s dance in this case be a simple two-step?

He could endorse the state initiative to take the state wage to $1.25 an hour higher than the current federal wage, then invoke his state position and his concern for employer costs back home by voting against a bill in the Senate to take the rate even higher.

That’s positively Clintonian.

And, presto, it’s precisely what Pryor told a television station Monday.

Ross, no longer in Congress, has no opportunity for the actual two-step. But I could envision him endorsing the minimum wage locally, but not nationally.

Local control, you know.

I’ve watched a lot of dance contests by covering Arkansas Democrats for these four decades. And I can recognize an opportunity for rhythmic boot-scootin’ when I see one.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Upcoming Events