It's now clear that the White House is going to be pushing really, really hard to abolish social security. We've heard the comments to the press, we've seen the
memo on how they're going to do it, we KNOW how the whole thing is going to play out. What are we waiting for?
This is our chance to define this issue before the White House can. We need a targeted campaign NOW, to cut this thing off before it gets out of hand. We've seen how effective the white house can be at sowing disinformation for their own purposes, we have no reason to suspect they won't be equally effective on this issue.
More below the fold...
I'm no expert on campaigns of this sort. But it certainly seems to me that if we can see what's coming and we just let it happen then we've got no one but ourselves to blame for the outcome. This whole privatization fiasco rests on the assumption that the White House can convince the American public that there is a large and impending crisis for Social Security. We all know that that just isn't so. The trick, of course, is how do we convince the American public of this.
If we do it right, it could be a real slam dunk. Not only could we acheive the immediate goal of saving Social Security, but we could pull together on an electrifying issue and give ourselves a strong victory after the embarassment of November. And if the ads were done right we could really expose the dirty workings of BushCo -- how they are blatanly manipulating the facts to their own ends, just like they did in Iraq. That could be very useful capital for the '06 elections. Of course, killing this initiative early on would also set the tone we want for the next two years. As Rep. Tom Cole noted, the President "cannot afford to fail. It would have repercussions for the rest of his program..."
Maybe somebody is already working on something like this, if so just let me know and I'll shut my yap trap. But I'm envisioning resurrecting the right's own Harry and Louise ads from the early 90s health care thing. It could play something like this:
Louise
------
"The president's new plan for Social Security is going to add $2 trillion dollars to the national debt."
Harry
-----
"That doesn't sound very secure to me."
Louise
------
"It sounds like a boondoggle. The CBO says social security won't start to run deficits until 2052 anyway. It seems like there should be a less drastic solution that doesn't endanger millions of peoples' retirements."
Harry
-----
"I don't want my retirement security tied up in some market gamble."
The problem with this, of course, is who pays and manages it. The Democratic Party doesn't seem in any shape to mount this kind of organized campaign. Maybe MoveOn or TrueMajority or one of those? I don't have any idea how much something like this would cost, but I'm sure someone here does.
The White House is clearly expecting the left to be rolled over on this one. It's time for us to pull together early and strong and stop this corrupt BushCo beast in its tracks, and here's our opportunity.