Politico SCOOP: Joe Biden PRIVATELY Said Same Thing He Said Publicly Two Weeks Ago

Politico scored an unusual scoop when it reported that President Joe Biden, as their headline put it, “privately tells governors: Minimum wage hike likely isn’t happening.”

The scoop is unusual for a couple of reasons, the first being that the headline is at best a misleading oversell when compared with what Biden is reported to have said in the article by Natasha Korecki and Christopher Cadelago:

When Joe Biden met with a group of mayors and governors last week he bluntly told them to get ready for a legislative defeat: his proposed minimum wage hike was unlikely to happen, he said, at least in the near term.

“I really want this in there but it just doesn’t look like we can do it because of reconciliation,” Biden told the group, according to a person in the room. “I’m not going to give up. But right now, we have to prepare for this not making it.”

In fact, as the article itself notes, Biden has said this exact thing in public, at length, and repeatedly — most notably before an obscure and little-known event called The Super Bowl:

Norah O’Donnell: You also want to raise the minimum wage to $15. Is that something you would be willing to negotiate on in order to get Republican support?

President Biden: Well apparently, that’s not going to occur because of the rules in the United States Senate.

Norah O’Donnell: So you’re saying the minimum wage won’t be…

President Biden: My guess is it will not be in it, but I do think that we should have a minimum wage stand by itself, $15, work your way up to the 15, it doesn’t have to be a boom!

And all the economics show if you do that, the whole economy rises. I’m prepared, as president of the United States, on a separate negotiation on a minimum wage, to work my way up to, from what it is now which is pain, look, no one should work 40 hours a week and live below the poverty wage, and if you’re making less than $15 an hour, you’re living below the poverty wage.

Norah O’Donnell: But that may not be in your American Rescue Plan.

President Biden: No, I put it in, but I don’t think it’s going to survive.

Since then, the President and his administration’s officials have consistently continued to advocate for the minimum wage hike, and pushed back against a CBO report that shows it would reduce employment by 1.4 million jobs, while lifting nearly a million Americans out of poverty.

Biden has gotten pushback from progressives who bristle at his proposal’s phase-in of the $15 minimum wage by 2025, which the president discussed in detail at this week’s CNN town hall.

It’s worth noting that  most reporters don’t get to write their own headlines, and in the content hole the size of an asteroid crater left by the end of the Trump presidency, the impulse to fluff a headline is powerful.

Watch the clip above via CBS News.