Barack Obama has cruised to the top of the Democratic field with a broad appeal, but his voting record has been strongly leftist. Now he is signing on to Senator Tom Harkin's bill which would enforce "comparable worth," a Carter-era idea which purports to "equalize" pay across various job descriptions to compensate for the fact that female-dominated job categories are typically paid less than male-dominated ones. The classic example proposed by proponents of the concept was that a secretary's job was as important as a truckdriver's, so they should be paid equally.

Mickey Kaus reports at Slate:

Obama has apparently just endorsed one of the worst ideas of Carter era liberalism, "comparable worth," which would have lawyers and judges deciding what every job is "worth" according to some bureaucratic, non-market criteria that would inevitably punish "unskilled" manual work--i.e, the very workers who are screwed the most by globalization. Are truckdrivers really paid too much? ...

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There's a pattern here--namely an interest-group-pleasing willingness to see the economy permeated by a legalistic adversarialism ("comparable worth" lawsuits, union-management negotiations) that might not trouble a president of the Harvard Law Review as much as the rest of us. ...

Read it all at the above link, and also Michael Barone's take on it:

In case you don't know what comparable worth is, it's an idea concocted by feminists in the 1970s or early 1980s. They said that jobs typically held by women pay less than jobs typically held by men. To eliminate this inequity, somebody-the courts, maybe, or some administrative agency, presumably with appeals to the courts-should decide what those jobs were really worth, based on some sort of convoluted criteria. So that it could be possible to prove that secretaries were of comparable worth to truck drivers and should be paid the same wages.

Barone's whole post is at the above link. This idea was practically laughed out of existence in the '70s, since the only way to properly evaluate the relative importance of jobs is through what we have now: the free market. Any "comparable worth" statute and regulatory regime would necessarily be subject to arbitrary decisions and biases, with government mandating pay scales to private industry. I believe it was the late Clarence Pendleton of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission who described the whole concept as "looney tunes." He had it right.

It's one thing for the far-left union tool Harkin to be hawking a return to the rejected follies of three decades ago; we have come to expect such lunacy from him. It is quite another kettle of fish for a leading Presidential candidate to endorse such a policy. It clearly indicates complete economic illiteracy on Obama's part.

The man is a convincing speaker, but if he endorses policies so far removed from reality as this one, he is truly an intellectual lightweight.