Principles can be painful.

I, as an occasional independent consultant, would just love to land a gig leading the User Experience design effort for a big world-facing institutional application.  I’d love the opportunity to pitch my skills to one of these institutions, convince them that I’m the right guy for the job, and bask in the eventual glory of a job well designed.  To say nothing of the payoff of 12-24 months’ lucrative work.

But if the big instutional customer were a front for AFSCME, the SEIU and the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, and the job was a website to help “community organizers” track union members who violated “Card Check” rules for future retribution, and to link these objectors to other union “assets” (goons) to service the transaction (throw bricks through their windows and kill their dogs), principle would tell me I would need to bow out of the gig.  No matter how much it paid.

Principle has its price.

Would bowing out of the project be a huge mistake?  Business hari-kiri?  From a bottom-line sense, it might very well be.   If “Mitch Berg Design” were publicly-held, it might even violate my fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders.  But if it’s my call, given that I oppose Card Check to say nothing of union thuggery, it wouldn’t even be a serious question.

One of the better, more thought-provoking conservative blogs I’ve encountered lately is “Minnesota Conservatives”, a duoblog featuring Minneapolis conservative Barbara Malzacher and 4th CD blogger “Shabbosgoy” – who’s a fairly well-known goy/guy in Saint Paul GOP circles, but I don’t know if his real identity is something he’s put on the blog yet, so I’ll hold off on that for now (note to self; find out why they’re not in the MOB).

Last week, Shabbosgoy wrote a post,  “On Saving The Emmer Campaign From Itself”, that caused a bit of a stir among Emmer’s followers.

Shabbosgoy’s (I’m going to save my fingers and call him SG from here on) premise is that Emmer’s “Waiter’s Wage” kerfuffle was a huge hit to the campaign.

Not fatal, of course…:

Not being glass-half-empty liberals, however, MC believes the campaign can right itself and move forward to victory in November. But the change has to be immediate, if not sooner. And the person who came up with the town hall seppuku should be tasered.

Let’s walk through them one by one:

1. Cancel the seppuku. Sure Emmer will be mocked but such pales in comparison to being tagged as the guy who wants servers to make $2.13 an hour. Such tagging has been ongoing all this week.

Let’s define our terms.

“Seppuku” (the political version, not the Japanese ritual self-disembowelment) is saying “I have no idea what E85 is” while in the middle of Minnesota’s Corn belt; it’s betraying a crucial tone-deaf ignorance.

Favoring a return to the tip credit – the exact system Minnesota used for tipped workers until 1990, and that is used in 43 other states to allow for the fact that tipped waistaff don’t rely on hourly wages for the bulk of their income – is a stance for principle; in this case, the principle that mandated minimum wages kill jobs.

Is it going to cost Emmer votes – especially given the way the agenda-driven media has reproted the story?  Perhaps among food servers; I’m sure waitrons at places in outstate Minnesota where the locals still consider a buck a lavish tip for a $30 tab will be un-thrilled by the prospect.  And understanding how tip credits work is important (and most people don’t); it only counts for time when the worker can get tips; not for time spent folding napkins or cleaning out the ice machine in back (which is paid at at least the regular minimum wage, and which is time that most decent food service workers like to avoid, the better to be out working tables and raking in tips).

Among people who run businesses?  Especially among bars and restaurants, whose profit margins have always been razor-thin?  Who’ve seen their bottom lines squeezed by $5/hour for every single waitress or bartender they have out in the house for the past couple of decades?  Or among parents of teenagers (ahem) who have a harder time than ever finding entry-level minimum wage jobs as the minimum wage has risen?

I’m not so sure.

2. If the death wish can’t be scrubbed, then Emmer should come out for making tips and gratuities tax-free. Who cares what it does to revenue? Just get on the right side of this issue politically.

That in particular is a good, princpled, conservative approach to the issue.  It’s also a federal issue controlled by the IRS, and most likely not something a governor can carry off.

3. Stop running for the endorsement. Emmer won. He can’t win with the narrow base that propelled him to victory. He’s in a general election race now and any campaign staff that can’t grasp the obvious ought to be waiting tables. We jest! Don’t shoot!

But as I’ve seen it all along, Emmer’s campaign has been about running on conservative principles all along – and selling those principles to the middle to convince them to move to meet him on the right, rather than scuttling toward the center.

The principle in this case is “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs” – or, more directly, “Get government out of the way of business creating more jobs”.  The loss of the tip credit has effectively tripled the cost of every waiter on a restauranteur’s or barkeep’s floor, giving them the option of slashing either profits or the number of waitstaff.  Emmer is proposing rectifying this.  The DFL and Media’s predictable response is “look at the money waiters might lose!” (when it’s not “where are the $100,000 waitstaff jobs?”); Emmer’s response, and that of his supporters, should be “but look at the jobs, averaging $8-15 an hour with tips, we’ll be creating!”.

4. Run on winning themes and speak of nothing else: lower taxes for all, less nanny-state interference in our lives, reduced state spending and the legitimate fear of the intellectually lazy DFL in control of the executive and legislative branches.

But I think that was Emmer’s point, if phrased inartfully and exploited deceptively.

5. Don’t take the post August 10th bait from Mark “Renoir-Toulouse Lautrec” Dayton. He’ll run a class warfare campaign and the tip-credit snafu only plays directly into that. Like most Democrats, he hasn’t had a new idea in decades. Point out he’s to the left of our wholly incompetent affirmative action President.

And here, SG is absolutely correct.

Finally, one friend of MC suggested something brilliant: bring in New Jersery Governor Chris Christie and campaign for real reform and not just tinkering around the edges. New ideas scare Democrats; so scare them!

I agree; Governor Christie is like the long-lost child of my own political idol, former Jersey City mayor Brett Schundler, who did for his city half a generation ago what Governor Christie is trying to do for the whole state today.

But here’s a question;  when it comes to tip credits, and the media and DFL’s (ptr) class-baiting response to the “story”, What Would Christie Do?

(Besides say “tip credits work in New Jersey”; the state is one of the 43 that allows ’em).

Voters will reward you. Look at what he’s doing in his state and think about what could be applied here to good effect. If Christie can have such success in New Jersey, MC holds out hope for this state of government workers.

Hope is good.

And to achieve hope, you need to start with a princple, and then move to achieve it.

And DFL/media caterwauling aside, I don’t think this past week has been a bad step on the way.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Business, The Economy and The Markets, Campaign '10, Conservatism, MNGOP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.