| Morning Jolt – February 27, 2013 By Jim Geraghty Good morning. Here's your Wednesday Morning Jolt. Enjoy! Jim Shockingly, Turnout Low for a Chicago Republican Primary in a Snowstorm We have our next House race almost set up: Former state Rep. Robin Kelly easily won the special Democratic primary Tuesday night in the race to replace the disgraced Jesse Jackson Jr. in Congress, helped by millions of dollars in pro-gun control ads from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's political fund. A snowstorm and lack of voter interest kept turnout low as Kelly had 52 percent to 25 percent for former U.S. Rep. Debbie Halvorson and 11 percent for Chicago 9th Ward Ald. Anthony Beale with 99 percent of precincts counted. Kelly will formally take on the winner of the Republican primary in an April 9 special general election in the heavily Democratic district. In the GOP contest, less than 25 votes separated convicted felon Paul McKinley and businessman Eric Wallace. Over at Breitbart, Rebel Pundit introduces us to the GOP nominee: McKinley's campaign released a statement claiming victory in the primary and, he was quick to attack New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who spent $2.3 million in the Democrat primary in support of the anti-gun extremist Robin Kelly over pro-Second Amendment Democrat Debbie Halvorson. Kelly has stated publicly she is "all for banning guns" and will lead on that issue. McKinley said in his release, "Mayor Bloomberg doesn't have enough money to pay off the broke, busted, and disgusted and manipulate the people's will. If Mayor Bloomberg thinks he can come and buy the general election, he's going to have to go through the American people." It appears McKinley will win the primary . . . with fewer than 1,000 votes. You Can't Community-Organize Your Way Out of a Sequester You're familiar with the notion of the Hedgehog and the Fox, right? "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"? Hardball producer Michael LaRossa marvels, "Only in America can a President propose a law, get it passed, and then actively campaign against implementing it." Yes, instead of spending time in Washington, with all of the members of Congress who could pass something to replace the sequester, Obama went to Newport News to hold a campaign-style event shouting about the need to pass something to replace the sequester. Permit me to spotlight a funny recent essay by RedState contributor Moe Lane, in which he examines the skills and philosophy of President Obama through the lens of role-playing video games: To begin with: a munchkin (or power gamer, or mini-maxer, or a bunch of terms that cannot be repeated here) is a type of gamer (roleplaying, computer, roleplaying-computer) who looks for loopholes in the rules — because games have rules, and there isn't a rule-set in the world that cannot be manipulated by somebody with enough motivation/obsession. And it turns out that the American Democratic primary system was full of such loopholes, which is why Barack Obama won the nomination in 2008 despite losing almost all the big Democratic primary states (and arguably the popular vote, depending on how you score Michigan). And it also turns out that the intersection of our electoral system with our rapidly-expanding online culture can produce what computer gamers call "exploits:" which is to say, a glitch in the system that gives someone an unintended benefit (if it just crashes the system, it's a bug). Strictly speaking, the system is not designed to elevate a state Senator to the Presidency in five years – for what turned out to be very good reasons – but it can be done. Mini-maxing is when a player designs a character that is fantastically good at one thing, at the expense of everything else. So you could end up with a character who is, say, obscenely good at hitting things with a sword — but can't convince a bunch of sailors to drink free beer. The mini-maxer doesn't mind; he'll just go around the game trying to resolve as many problems as he can by hitting them with a sword (tabletop gamers — err, "D&D players" — often call this The Gun is My Skill List, although obviously substitute a sword for a gun in the name). The problems that the mini-maxer can't resolve that way he'll either ignore until later, or else flail about on the screen while hitting the buttons quickly and/or at random ("button-mashing"), in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway. And that's where we are now. Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office. And that's not 'elect Democrats.' Or 'elect liberals.' Or even 'elect people that Barack Obama likes.' It's just him: his team is trying pretty hard right now to figure out how to use their over-specialized skill more generally, but they don't have much time to figure it out and the system is actually rigged against them in this case. Barack Obama certainly doesn't know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He's so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix. In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn't really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people's buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway. How did Obama try to pass his stimulus? Campaign-style events. How did Obama try to pass Obamacare? Campaign-style events. How is Obama pushing for amnesty legislation? Campaign-style events. Gun control? Campaign-style events. Fiscal cliff? Campaign-style events. This is all besides his actual presidential campaign. But mind you, his campaign-style rallies didn't move the poll numbers on Obamacare, and Democrats to this day never use the word "stimulus" when discussing new spending. Obama is very good at getting people to like him and believe in him — more so than his agenda. We see this phenomenon when his overall job-approval rating is five to ten points higher than his handling of most major issues such as the economy. But this is what he knows, and after his reelection, he's convinced it works. So here we go. More cowbell. 
The Minimum-Wage Hike: Minimum Economic Benefit, but Maximum Political Value The political wisdom and the economic wisdom of the minimum wage are so far apart, the distance might as well be measured in light years. If your aim is to help out the folks on the lowest rung on the economic ladder, hiking the minimum wage is pretty useless. Does anyone out there dispute that when you make labor — particularly minimally skilled labor — more expensive, businesses will either A) cut staff B) cut back on hours C) be slow to hire additional staff or D) stop hiring for the foreseeable future? Even if you support the minimum wage, do you believe that when an employee becomes more expensive to a company, the employer's instinct is increase that worker from part-time to full-time, or to expand his hours, or hire more people? A lot of studies argue the impact is minimal. But it's popular. Really popular. In the poll from USA Today/Pew Research Center, 71 percent of Americans back increasing the minimum wage to $9 an hour from $7.25 currently, with 26 percent opposed. The plan, introduced by Mr. Obama in his State of the Union address, has 87 percent support among Democrats and 68 percent support among independents. Among Republicans, 50 percent back the measure, with 47 percent opposed. So why is it so popular? It certainly isn't because minimum-wage workers make up a significant chunk of the workforce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent figure on this is from 2011, and they calculated that 3.8 million workers made minimum wage or less, out of an employed labor force of about 140 million. So we're talking about 2.4 percent of workers. Of those 3.8 million, about 900,000 were age 16 to 19. You'll find slightly different numbers if you only count those working full-time; Mark Perry at AEI runs the numbers: Almost all full-time workers (99.4%) are earning more than the minimum wage, and almost all full-time hourly workers (98.3%) are earning more than the minimum wage. Most importantly, the fact that more than three out of four teenagers (77.2%), who are the least skilled and least educated group of workers, earned more than the minimum wage in 2011 would suggest the minimum wage is mostly an entry-level wage for beginning workers with no skills. The reality of the labor market is that even a large majority of previously unskilled teenage workers are earning more than the minimum wage as soon as they acquire minimal jobs skills and work habits, and can demonstrate their value to employers. Do people believe that if the folks on the bottom get a raise, then there's a cascading effect where they will get a raise, too? That's a long wait for a train that won't come, I suspect. It's also a pretty dire worldview for an employee: "The only circumstance in which one hour of my labor will be worth more than the absolute minimum allowed by law is if the government comes along and forces them to pay me more." Keep in mind, there are some folks out there whose grasp of these issues is . . . er . . . debatable. As an employee of SAS Cupcakes on Main Street, junior Brianna Dulio sells cupcakes, greets guests and helps customers with questions. For her work, she said the current minimum wage is not nearly enough, but she does not think any raise would be sufficient. "I don't think you can ever put a price on what we do," Dulio said. "I don't think you can ever put a price on what we do." Actually, you can, miss. It's $7.25 per hour. I mention this because I had a similar debate on Twitter with a left-of-center woman who insisted there was absolutely no conceivable way to measure how much an employee was worth to a company. She seemed to believe that companies hired employees and then just picked a number out of a hat to assign to the dollar value of the goods or services produced by those employees. (Sure, some workers are overvalued and others are undervalued — I'm sure all of you wonderful readers are in the undervalued pile — but a company that aims to avoid bankruptcy will have some sense of what the employee will add to the company's revenues, and from that, at least a rough sense of how much they can afford to pay.) Anyway, at some point, Congress will vote on a minimum wage. Should Republicans fight it? As of now, that would mean doing the right thing economically, and paying a brutal price politically. If the public demands self-destructive policies, how hard must Republicans fight to save them from themselves? ADDENDUM: Janie Johnson: "There is finally conclusive evidence that Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi are dead. They both registered to vote in Chicago." To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com Save 75% . . . Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for print-edition information. Click here for digital-edition information. And National Review makes a great gift. Click here to send a full-year gift to NR Digital, and here to send a full-year subscription to the print edition. Conservatives – stay healthy! Get plenty of Vitamin Sea on the next National Review cruise. Visit www.nrcruise.com for complete information about our next trip. National Review, Inc. | 
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