Democrats frame 2014 midterms around “income inequality”

Rhetoric coming out of the Democratic Party in recent weeks illustrates the platform they’ll be running in 2014 hoping to unseat Republicans in the House and retain the Senate. President Obama has stated that “income inequality” is especially pronounced in the United States and 2014 will be the year Democrats attempt to use that issue as their platform.

Report from CSMonitor:

For months now, it has been clear that Republicans will try to make the 2014 midterm elections all about “Obamacare” as they push to win majority control of the Senate. This week, Democrats will counter in earnest with their election theme. Starting Monday, they will turn to issues of income inequality in a bid not only to rouse their base, but also to win support from middle-class Americans who worry that only the rich are getting richer.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D) will try on Monday to clear a legislative hurdle to allow a vote on extending unemployment insurance for 1.3 million long-term jobless Americans whose benefits expired Dec. 28. Look, too, for Senate Democrats to push for a higher federal minimum wage. Democrats are making both efforts against the historic backdrop of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” launched 50 years ago this week in his State of the Union message.

President Obama, meanwhile, will carry the torch further on Jan. 28, when he’ll use his State of the Union address to echo a pre-Christmas speech in which he declared that income inequality and declining social mobility are “the defining challenge of our time.”

It is a political strategy that carries some risks. Some Americans are already wary of Mr. Obama’s aims, wondering whether he lied to them – falsely telling them they could keep health insurance plans they liked – in order to win passage of legislation that makes insurance widely available to the poor. Moreover, the inequality issue has the potential to expose a fault line among Democrats, with liberals such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts pushing the party to go much further down the path of federal entitlements and benefits than many others are comfortable going.

So far, the party appears to be stopping short of an Occupy Wall Street revival.

Yes, think Occupy Wall Street, revamped for 2014 instead of 2011/2012.

What are your thoughts on this? Clearly it is an attempt to refocus the debate away from the failings of Obamacare and hit Republicans where the Democrats think they’re vulnerable.