It started out regularly enough, as yet another tactic from the progressive playbook with which Democrats would be able to shamelessly beat their Republican challengers over the head during their 2014 midterm campaigns with the most shallow, populist notions of “fairness” and “inequality” that their deeply misguided faux-economic sensibilities could think up.

But now… it’s become so much more. With ObamaCare definitively on the rocks, their campaign platforms are going to need a serious boost that can double as an outright distraction from the healthcare law’s many vagaries and the president’s lawless response to them — and what better way than with the evergreen economic awfulness that is an arbitrarily determined minimum-wage hike?

They’ve been readying the cannons in earnest, via the NYT:

The effort to take advantage of growing populism among voters in both parties is being coordinated by officials from the White House, labor unions and liberal advocacy groups. In a series of strategy meetings and conference calls among them in recent weeks, they have focused on two levels: an effort to raise the federal minimum wage, which will be pushed by President Obama and congressional leaders, and a campaign to place state-level minimum wage proposals on the ballot in states with hotly contested congressional races. … “It puts Republicans on the wrong side of an important value issue when it comes to fairness,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s senior adviser. “You can make a very strong case that this will be a helpful issue for Democrats in 2014. But the goal here is to actually get it done. That’s why the president put it on the agenda.” … At the same time, Democratic campaign officials and liberal activists — conceding that Democrats face tough prospects in some Senate races — are working to put minimum-wage increases on the ballot next year in places like Arkansas, Alaska and South Dakota. The hope is to stoke Democratic turnout in conservative-leaning states where the party’s Senate candidates have been put on the defensive by the mishandled rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

The wheels of what is quickly becoming a clutch piece of campaign strategery are already well in motion; the White House has already declared their support for a proposal that would jack up the minimum wage to $10.10/hour, and the Obama administration is planning more presidential speeches throughout the year that they hope they’ll be able to conveniently time along with any minimum-wage votes in Congress. Big Labor has offered its undying support for the proposal, of course, and are planning to shore up a grassroots campaign that can take better advantage of the idea at both the state and national levels — an idea that they never seem to fail to grasp is an entirely counterproductive and ultimately harmful method of reducing the income inequality that has only worsened throughout President Obama’s tenure.