Bush's Social Security Phase-Out Proposals Sinking Fast

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday March 01, 2005 · 3:42 PM PST

2005/03/01 · 15:42

Mike Allen at the Washington Post reports:

White House officials are telling Republican lawmakers and allies on K Street that they must begin to overcome opposition to President Bush's proposal for changing Social Security within six weeks, GOP strategists said yesterday.

The GOP strategists stressed that the six-week goal is not a hard deadline for a political breakthrough, but they said the public's tepid view of Social Security change cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely. The directive raises the possibility that Republicans will have to reconsider whether legislation can be passed this year, as Bush wants.

Polls show widespread skepticism of Bush's proposal for creating individual Social Security investment accounts for younger workers, and Democratic lawmakers have voiced nearly uniform opposition. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that some allies of the president are focused on possible split-the-difference deals that would significantly scale back Bush's proposal, yet enable him to claim an incremental victory.

Re the polls: and how. Things are looking quite bleak for Bush, as a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll out today shows only 38% of Americans feel "major changes must be made to Social Security within the next two years", a long way down from the 49% last January, and that substantially more people trust the Democrats to make those changes than trust Republicans. (The poll also showed that 75% of Americans "held a favorable opinion of the AARP"; you can begin to see the logic of the "fling everything against the wall and see what sticks" attacks by USA Next.)

So the White House is giving their lobbyists and supporters six weeks to turn things around, or they're bailing in favor of something less ambitious, or perhaps nothing at all.

None of this means Social Security isn't still in danger. The same WaPo article informs us of the next administration steps, which include a three-person team within the Treasury Department "modeled after the Coalition Information Centers that promoted the administration message around the world during the war in Afghanistan" that will help to strategize and coordinate the administration's "crisis" message. So look for messages informing us that if we don't privatize Social Security, opium production among AARP members will increase 200% or... er... something.

Nevertheless, it's looking increasingly like the only way Bush will pull this off is if he manages to get a handful of Democratic turncoats to help him do Social Security in under a banner of "bipartisanship", and the only way that is going to happen is if those Democrats ignore the poll numbers, ignore their party leadership, ignore the grass roots, and ignore their own constituents, all for the sake of giving Bush a victory against one of the most popular programs the federal government ever managed to create.

And that, in turn, makes Senator Joseph Lieberman's new kissy-kissy noises about a compromise position even more absurd. There's simply no need: Bush tried selling the country the notion of partially dismantling Social Security via a plan that would do nothing to solve the "crisis" his own administration manufactured. It isn't working. The odds today have the Bush plan going down, barring a major public turnaround.

Simply amazing. Lieberman has the Wile E. Coyote-like ability to place himself in exactly the wrong spot, at the wrong time, in any situation.

Honestly, it's infuriating to watch. Psst -- Joe. Look down.

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