Considering the merit of Bush’s idea, the opposition he’s likely to face, and the enormous political risks involved, it’s only natural for many to wonder if the president has completely lost his mind by launching a campaign to privatize Social Security.
Mark Schmitt, however, raised a compelling point (via Wampum) that some in the White House seem to believe Republicans can win by losing.
[White House “Office of Strategic Initiatives” director Peter] Wehner is really arguing with a faction that believes it can win “the battle of ideas” without winning the legislation. That’s a very important thing to understand. Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman and others have aggressively driven home the point that the goal of the right here is to destroy Social Security. And there is no doubt that that is what the result would be if what we assume to be the White House plan became law. But while there is a faction of the right that would like to destroy Social Security, there is obviously also a considerable faction that wants only to destroy the political advantage that Democrats and liberals still get from Social Security. That’s the faction that Wehner is addressing, and he’s basically arguing — feebly, I think — that they can’t put up a merely symbolic fight, but have to actually win the legislation.
For the free-lunch faction, “winning” on Social Security is all defined in the last two sentences of the first paragraph of Wehner’s memo. It involves putting the Democrats in a position where they do nothing but defend an old and boring program for most of the year. Republicans will appear to be the party of innovation, change, economic opportunity, while Democrats are the party of security, limited choices, old programs and old people. Democrats won’t control the agenda, they’ll just spend the year being against something, and they won’t be speaking to the actual economic anxieties of younger people or working-age adults, because Social Security is a very limited response to those anxieties.
In this scenario, losing the legislation isn’t the end of the world, as long as it’s mostly Democrats in opposition and mostly Republicans in support.
That very well may be the plan. “We’re the ones who want to reform Social Security,” the Republicans will say, “but the Dems are afraid to improve the system.”
I hope that is the plan, however, because such an approach almost never works.
It’s likely that many Dems, anxious to appear reform-minded and open to “innovation,” are insisting that the minority party create its own Social Security plan to offer as an alternative to the Bush scheme. That way, we’re not against Bush’s way; we’re for our way. I’m not convinced that’s necessary.
In the first two years of Clinton’s presidency, Republicans blocked a lot of initiatives, but two stand out: health care and campaign-finance reform. Both systems were in need of sweeping changes, which the public widely recognized. Dems embraced change, while Republicans stood in the way, blasted the Dem approach, and defended the status quo. The GOP wasn’t for anything; it was against Clinton.
Were Republican candidates punished in the mid-term elections for being obstructionists? Did Dems successfully label the GOP as little more than defenders of “an old and boring” system? No, if memory serves, Republicans did pretty well in 1994.
Republicans are running the show and the public knows it, just as we had it all in ’93 and ’94. Voters didn’t care that Dems were trying to reform health care and campaign finance; they cared that it didn’t happen, regardless of whether Republicans were offering an alternative or not. And those dealt with issues in which the public wanted significant change, as opposed to Social Security, in which they’re hardly convinced that a radical solution is necessary.
In other words, let the GOP go into ’06 with a record of failed attempts at Social Security “reform.” We’ll run ads telling voters that Republicans tried to gut Social Security but we stood in their way and they’ll run ads telling voters that they really wanted to “reform” Social Security but those rascally Dems stopped them. Given these circumstances, I like our chances.