A crowd of several hundred cheered Wednesday outside the Capitol for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernard Sanders, as he took the stage to demand a $15 national minimum wage and chided President Obama for paying “starvation wages” to federal workers.
His liberal battle cry also challenged Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has labored to keep up with Mr. Sanders’ far-left economic agenda that increasingly appeals to the party’s base.
But it’s not just Mr. Sanders that has irked Mrs. Clinton. She has been upstaged at every turn by her long shot rivals.
She was outbid by former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on expanding rights for illegal immigrants and took a backseat to former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee when endorsing Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Mr. Chaffee beat her to it by more than 12 hours, as the former secretary of state slowly settled on the fact that she couldn’t differentiate herself from the foreign policy of her former boss.
Struggling to find areas of leadership, Mrs. Clinton is sliding in the polls, seeing her unfavorable rating shoot up as she slips behind leading Republicans in head-to-head matchups.
The former first lady, senator and top diplomat has lost support in the key swing states of Colorado, Iowa and Virginia, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released Wednesday.
At least half of the voters in all three states viewed Mrs. Clinton unfavorably.
She scored a negative 35 percent/56 percent favorability rating in Colorado, a negative 33 percent/56 percent split in Iowa and a 41 percent/50 percent rating in Virginia.
The results mirrored other surveys that have showed a majority of voters doubt Mrs. Clinton’s integrity.
“She has lost ground in the horserace and on key questions about her honesty and leadership,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. “On being a strong leader, a key metric in presidential campaigns, she has dropped four to 10 points depending on the state, and she is barely above 50 percent in each of the three states.”
What’s more, the poll showed her trailing in matchups against GOP hopefuls former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in all three states.
Mr. Sanders, the Vermont independent and avowed socialist who has emerged as her chief Democratic rival, actually fares better than Mrs. Clinton against Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush in Iowa and better than her against Mr. Walker in Colorado.
Mrs. Clinton continues to enjoy a commanding lead in most primary polls and remains the odds-on favorite to win the nomination, but she still gets one-upped on nearly every issue.
Mrs. Clinton steered her campaign sharply to the left last week with a speech outlining an economic agenda that promised higher taxes on the rich and bigger paychecks for everybody else, which she would accomplish with more federal mandates and increased government spending.
She still didn’t match Mr. Sanders.
“We are here today to send a very loud and a very clear message to the United States Congress, the president of the United States and corporate America: In the richest country on the face of the earth, no one who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty,” Mr. Sanders said at the rally outside the Capitol.
He announced that he had introduced a bill that would increase the national minimum hourly wage from the current $7.25 to $15, which has been a longtime goal of unions and liberal activists.
He even called out Mr. Obama for being a bad boss, urging him to sign an executive order guaranteeing that federal workers make at least $15 per hour and get union membership.
“Today, the largest low-wage employer in this country is not McDonald’s. It’s not Burger King. It’s not Wal-Mart. The reality is that the largest low-wage employer in this country is the federal government,” declared Mr. Sanders. “That has got to change. It’s time for the federal government to be a model employer, not a low-wage employer.”
Mrs. Clinton flinched on the $15 minimum wage.
She parroted union rhetoric about the need for higher pay last month when she made a telephone address to a “Fight for 15” convention of low-wage workers in Detroit, but she stopped short of backing a hike to the federal minimum wage.
Pressed by a reporter on the issue last week in New Hampshire, Mrs. Clinton refused to commit.
“I support the local efforts that are going on that are making it possible for people working in certain localities to actually earn 15 [dollars per hour],” she said.
On immigration, Mrs. Clinton moved early in the campaign to promise pro-immigration activists everything they wanted: a path to citizenship for America’s roughly 12 million illegal immigrants, an expansion of Mr. Obama’s deportation amnesty and more protections for immigrations facing deportation.
Mr. O’Malley took it a step further. He added an end to detentions of most illegals and an expansion of Obamacare to cover illegal immigrants and so-called Dreamers, the young illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.
“I believe that every president moves the ball down the field as much as they can. I would move it farther,” Mr. O’Malley said last week at a roundtable event in New York.
• David Sherfinski contributed to this report.
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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