It Is Indeed the Economy, Commentators

Perhaps you didn’t notice in the midst of the continuing TV series on the White House misadventures of that rich kid from Beverly Hills, but President Clinton wants to raise the minimum wage.

He also wants to save Social Security, expand Medicare coverage and sharply decrease school class sizes. But the media have treated these points raised in Clinton’s State of the Union speech and now presented as a legislative program as little more than an annoying distraction from the presidential soaps.

Even columnist George F. Will was too caught up in the sex scandal to comment on the proposed minimum wage increase. In the past, he was eager to condemn such largess for the working poor. Last year, for example, Will cited “that feeble heart of Clinton’s miniaturized agenda, an increase in the minimum wage.”

Feeble it may be to someone who can rake in $10,000 for a single lecture, but raising the minimum wage to $6.15 an hour at least brings it up to the level of 20 years ago in real dollars. Maybe as people are forced off welfare, the $1-an-hour increase over the next two years might mean they can survive. And if we could get state and federal officials to enforce the minimum wage law, we might remove some of the attraction of too easily exploited illegal immigrant labor.

The increase proposed last week by Clinton and congressional Democrats would mean that someone who worked a 40-hour week for 52 weeks would earn $12,792 annually, about the same amount paid to many famous Washington pundits for one luncheon talk. This is not to suggest that huge fees automatically pits one against a wage increase for the 12 million workers, mostly women, who are at the bottom level. Cokie Roberts, who often shares the ABC spotlight with Will and who has earned $30,000 per lecture, has written kindly about a minimum wage increase in a newspaper column.

What media millionaires do share is a lack of interest in discussing this sort of subject on TV, which is why it rarely comes up. An examination of substantive issues doesn’t compete with sex, lies and audio tapes in the ratings sweeps. And high ratings and frequent exposure are the ties that bind the media elite, so influential in setting the national agenda.

But theirs is not the agenda of the public, which clearly has rejected sex for substance. People want the system to work and Clinton to remain as president because they believe he’s doing a good job, particularly for their pocketbooks.

What heresy! Commentators with their tax-sheltered millions are stunned that the public wants to focus on low inflation, a balanced budget, low unemployment and the first rise in real wages in years. How dull.

People support Clinton because he’s done right by them much of the time. When Clinton came into office, the economy was foundering. The message was to learn Japanese as quickly as possible. Five years later, the U.S. economy is by far the strongest in the world, and if the president doesn’t deserve some credit for that, why does it matter who’s president?

Clinton impresses average Americans with his seriousness of purpose as well as his ability to address their fears. Hard to turn against a leader who worries about your losing medical coverage by being downsized. He has laid claim to the progressive center, and the public has grown to trust him as a political leader, even if people have doubts about his performance as a husband. They do not buy the absurdity suggested by Republicans that possible perjury in a civil suit is akin to President Nixon’s using the FBI, CIA and Internal Revenue Service to destroy his critics.

Clinton is the master of the win-win solution to our economic problems, and so far, much of what he has advocated has worked. That is why he now has support in calling for an increase in the minimum wage. Two years ago, when it was last increased, the Republican leadership claimed it would cause unemployment, but instead unemployment is at a 25-year low and the economy is booming.

But the economy always booms for media stars, who find much to chatter about in good times and bad. They now form a new class, even among the wealthy, insulated from the vagaries of the market and impervious to the daily traumas--big and small--of ordinary folk. They wouldn’t even know how to do the laundry. Better to trust the punditry of the public; celebrity journalists would do well to tune in.