WWJD? Raise the Minimum Wage

I link to Arianna Huffington a lot, but that's because she's good and people need to be pointed in her direction.

As, for example, her most recent post, which is about how Democrats need to wake up to the moral issues that relate to the economic issues they champion. The potential is there to turn the whole values debate against the Republicans, Huffington says, and I agree with her.

The issue, I think, is not so much turning so-called Republican values voters into Democrats. Rather, the issue is mobilizing liberal Christians to stand up and fight with all they've got against the hijacking of their religion by right-wing zealots, who misuse and mischaracterize Christianity for political purposes.

As Huffington says:

"Indeed, if you removed every reference to poverty in the New Testament, the Good Book would be reduced to little more than a Not Bad Pamphlet. In the words of Rev. Jim Wallis, 'The Prophets would be decimated, the Psalms destroyed, and the Gospels ripped to shreds.' On the other hand, there is not a single mention of gay marriage or the need to ban it. "

My evidence is all anecdotal, but I have met many liberal and moderate Christians who seem pretty much indifferent to, or even positively opposed to, bringing morality into political debate. It's not difficult to see why this is. It is, after all, a liberal truism that morality is a private matter. Moreover the religious right has in recent years pretty much driven liberal interpretations of Christianity out of the public conciousness. In doing so, they have been abetted by a media that continually deals in stereotypes based on the most extreme right-wing Christians (Falwell, Dobson, Robertson). Given all that, it seems obvious that liberal and moderate Christians respond so hesitantly to right-wing values arguments because there is doubt in their minds, sown by voices both religious and secular, telling them they are not Christian enough.

But if candidates begin to make the counterarguments Huffington suggests, liberal and moderate Christians will respond. Instead of trying to find non-bigotted, non-misogynistic ways to appeal to right-wing Christians, Democrats must engage moderate and liberal Christians, many of whom consistently fail to see much, if any difference between individual candidates. If Democrats are successful in attracting and energizing liberal and moderate Christians, they will begin putting their values forward as a challenge to the primacy of right-wing Christian values in the media, in the voting booth and in society at large.

Democrats can, and must, win the values debate. If they fail it's not just the election that could be at stake. If they fail, healing the damage done over the past six years might well prove impossible. If they fail, they could easily win the election and yet lose the country.