Our first installment began the task of decoding Barack Obama's curious appeal to our right-of-center friends and relatives. (His point man on domestic policy is also the DLC's Senior Economist -- a deregulatin', free tradin', globalizin', sharp-shootin' son-of-a-centrist-gun from Waco Texas, Milton Academy, Yale's Skull and Bones society and the Chicago school.)
The second member of Obama's policy advisor triad is Harvard's Jeffrey Liebman. Specialty: "pensions and poverty", i.e., "entitlements", i.e., "Social Security".
Liebman's reputation: centrist alarmist and moderate privatizer.
He has supported partial privatization of the government-run retirement system, an idea that's anathema to many Democrats and bears a similarity to a proposal for personal investment accounts that Bush promoted, then dropped in 2005.
"Liebman has been to open to private accounts and most people in town would say he's a moderate supporter of them,'' said Michael Tanner, a Social Security expert at the Cato Institute
Flashback: November 4, 2004, a triumphant Dubya announced "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it." First acquisition target on his hostile takeover list? Bush declared his intent to "save" Social Security, i.e., "privatize" Social Security, i.e. "kill" Social Security, seizing the opportunity to implement CATO's "Leninist strategy" (pdf) articulated a generation earlier.
The netroots smelled out the plot, and leapt to the ramparts. Josh Marshall brilliantly classified the Democrats "most likely to go wobbly" on the issue as the Fainthearted Faction. More bloggers, experts and advocacy group allies joined the fray. Their full-court press harried the Fainthearts into extinction, and pushed or persuaded a goodly share of elected Republicans to take the pledge: no private accounts.
By mid-2005 privatization was Dead Before Arrival. The White House never even coughed up a legislative package ... just a clutch of trial balloons, and even those didn't pencil out. In the back halls of think tanks, however, the dream would not die. A bipartisan trio of entitlement crisis hawks concocted a "nonpartisan" compromise plan -- a plan to save the plan to "save" Social Security.
In a 2005 policy paper Liebman, along with [Bush economist] Andrew Samwick of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Maya MacGuineas, a former aide to Senator John McCain, advocated a mix of benefit cuts, tax increases and mandatory personal accounts to shore up the system ...
(This interview with Liebman. provides an accessible brief of the L-M-S proposal.)
No surprise here. Liebman was central to Bill Clinton's flirtation with private accounts (eventually discarded as sharper analysis penetration the fog of crisis rhetoric and "free lunch" solution, replaced by a proposal to keep contributions in the public pool but invest some of them in higher-return private assets).
Liebman and Chief Reaganomicist Martin Feldstein had already uncorked Distributional Aspects of Social Security and Social Security Reform (U. Chicago Press, 2002), polishing the case for private accounts.
Candidate Obama's stated position (and historical trajectory) on Social Security reform is intriguing enough in it's own right. He seems to have arrived at Hillary's "donut hole" position, for which he scathingly criticized her last summer, while simultaneously claiming she didn't have a position. We'll reserve this decoding exercise to the honors seminar.
[Cross-posted from The Confluence.]
