Our "bold" initiative is a piddling increase in the minimum wage. The real  problem isn't  the minimum wage It's the number of people who casn't find good jobs that pay decent wages and provide decent benefits and job security. A 5$ minimum wage would be fine if there were enough jobs for laborers trying to raise families  that paid much more and  the minimum wage jobs were mostly limited to the very young and simply working low-paying jobs while in school or training programs.

  We need to return to the goal of achieving a society where everyone who is willing to work hard can make  enough to raise a family at a decent standard of living and live without constant fear of displacement.

   Saying we have to pay convenience store clerks and busboys a slightly higher amount isn't any answer. The answer is providing those people with the option  jobs that pay more because they produce more even if they require no more "skill."

  That's obvious but we don't see much effort from our leaders to reform policies that encourage "capital" to invest in domestic manufacturing and pay a decent wage because that really would hit power and wealth where it lives.

  The Democratic Party seems only marginally more concerned about the need for a large and strong "blue collar" middle class than the Republicans and sometimes even more desirious of a country where the middle class is limited to those with education and training relevant to a service economy.

   Until we get back to advancing the cause of the working class in the economic realm we have no one to blame but ourselves for the apathy of many and the oppsition of others who vote Republican based on explotative appeals on social issues.

 If you show up on election day without being properly registered and without proof of identity and proof of residence, you're not engaged in the process. If the entire extent of your effort was filling out a form provided to you by a political operative and trusting the political organization to ensure everythig is done properly you're still not very engaged in the process.

 We could defeat those efforts with little problem if those targeted by "voter fraud" efforts were engaged and thought the very minimal effort actually needed to ensure the vote was worth a tiny bit of advance planning and effort. That requires more than hastily and ineptly organized voter registration efforts in election years.

   We need for more people to decide for themselves that particpation is important and to go down to voter registration with ID and proof of residence and register to vote for themselves. When party activists simply conduct mass registration campaigns and submit often  admittedly questionable paperwork, probelms are inevitable.

  We decry the efforts to disqualify people registered in these drives but we don't ask the deeper question of why this is the only way we can get people to register. The answer is that we don't give them much reason to make any more of an effort to ensure they are properly qualified.

  If we were really doing things which more people were convinced were vitally important to their lives we wouldn't need to spend millions and millions of dollars hiring people to register to vote using methods that ARE subject to legitimate challenge in many cases.

   Instead of wasting so much effort and emotion bemoaning the ease with which these registration drives are sometimes offset, we should spend the time asking what we need to do to truly motivate these people.

  As for the GOP using advertising techniques and social hot-button issues,  that's free speech and they are not going to stop and we can't make them. The real question is why do the appeals  work. It's not because people are stupid; it's because many don't think we offer a better alternative and on the bread and butter issues they may have a better and more accurate perception than the people who think these blue collar voters are  being fooled.

  We have to offer them something substantially better than Republican economic policies or the blue collar people are being perfectly rational in deciding to trade very slightly worse economic policies in exchange for closer alignment with their social views.