Illinois gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner, rich and shady
Bruce Rauner, the super-wealthy Republican nominee for Illinois governor who once clarified that he was not in the top 1 percent, he was in the top .01 percent, has been trying to emphasize his ordinary guy status with an ad focusing on his
"trashcan van." It's a little hard to make the ordinary-guy-driving-an-old-van story stick, though, when you belong to a
wine club that costs $100,000 a year, when you're
actually driving around in
this non-trashcan, and when your take on
the minimum wage is ... well:
“I have said, on a number of occasions, that we could have a lower minimum wage or no minimum wage as part of increasing Illinois’ competitiveness. I’ve said that many times,” Rauner told WJBC host Scott Laughlin.
“It’s a mistake for me to focus on lowering the minimum wage or eliminating it because there are better ways to increase Illinois’ competitiveness,” Rauner said at the time.
Oh, so it's not that you don't think it's true that eliminating or lowering the minimum wage would help Illinois' competitiveness, it's just that it's a mistake to focus on it. Would this be the kind of mistake you realize right around when you're running for governor? It seems like it might be.
Rauner has company in having seen a very limited kind of minimum wage light as he runs for office. Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton, locked in a competitive race for Senate, has announced that he's going to vote for a ballot initiative raising the Arkansas minimum wage "as a citizen." Which is to say, as a senator, his take on the federal minimum wage would be different, but he's not going to come out and oppose a popular measure facing voters on his own race.
It's a marker of how incredibly popular a minimum wage increase is that even Republicans like Rauner and Cotton can't quite admit where they really stand on it. But voters should beware, and read between every single word these guys say. Because "it's a mistake for me to focus on lowering the minimum wage or eliminating it" and "I'm going to vote for that initiated act as a citizen" are worlds away from doing the right thing.