If I didn’t know better, I’d say we have a genuine meme going here.
To build public support and circumvent critics in Congress and the media, the president will travel the country and warn of the disastrous consequences of inaction, as he did to sell his Iraq and terrorism policies during the first term, White House officials said.
President Bush is setting out to convince the nation that the danger is imminent and can be addressed only with bold action. Sound familiar?
The White House is deploying the strategy it used to sell the war in Iraq to sell its plan for partial privatization of the Social Security system. The intelligence might not be as flawed, but the spin is equally disingenuous.
[Opponents of Bush’s plan] accuse the White House of exaggerating the issue’s urgency, saying it used a similar ploy to justify the war in Iraq by citing an urgent threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that have never been found.
“The administration’s blitz on Social Security is eerily reminiscent of the way they made their case for war,” said David Wade, spokesman for Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the former Democratic presidential nominee who sits on the Senate Finance Committee.
The run-up to President Bush’s plan to deal with Social Security is looking a lot like the run-up to his plan to deal with Saddam Hussein.
The expected Social Security shortfall has been a perennial domestic concern in much the same way that Hussein’s intransigence with arms inspectors was a perennial foreign-policy concern: From the White House to Congress to think tanks, policy makers worried about it, but presidents (including Bush) felt no immediate need to deal with it…. Still, the link between the current economy and a Social Security deficit that will begin to strike benefits in decades is every bit as speculative and theoretical as the link between Hussein and the war on terrorism in late 2002.
We can only hope this continues. The more people appreciate the similarities, the better off we’ll be in opposing Bush’s scheme. Americans no longer believe the war in Iraq was worth fighting and many now recognize the bill of goods they were sold. If the public believed Bush was wrong about an imminent threat in 2003, he’ll lack the credibility to pull the wool over their eyes again in 2005.
Bush is counting on the same fears letting him use the same rhetoric — “the price of inaction is worse than the price of action” and “the threat is imminent and the crisis is now” — to deceive the nation again. Fool me once…