I was watching "Washington Journal" on C-SPAN this morning and heard three callers in the space of about five minutes all making the same point: there would be no problem with Social Security were it not for the government dipping into that surplus over the last few years to pay other expenses. These were old folks, and they were pissed. Perhaps most remarkably, the segment really had nothing to do with Social Security--the guest was a political reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, talking about the battle in Ohio.
This got me thinking that maybe it's time to bring back the "lockbox".
Now, I was not a fan of Al Gore's usage of this tactic (or indeed much else about Gore) in 2000; I thought it was typically Gore in that it both bored me and felt like pandering. Now, though, I think the lockbox concept, and the public notion of morality that underlies Social Security, is really well suited for the moment. Kerry can raise the point that these callers made--the "problem," such as it is (and I strongly recommend checking out James K. Galbraith's writing on this at Salon.com), is really an outgrowth of Bush duplicity and lack of fiscal restraint. And in creating this artificial crisis, he's trying to divide the country into young against old.
Seniors are already angry about the flu vaccine debacle. A riff on Social Security, the most popular of the New Deal programs and the top target of the Rovians looking to take this country back to 1896, could be a great "closing argument." And not only Kerry, but the reactivated Bill Clinton--who used Social Security to stave off tax cuts for billionaires in the '90s--should be pushing this at every turn. What say you?