The Bush gang only knows how to run one play. It’s a pretty good play, and it’s been effective for them, but it’s a play suited for a particular kind of opponent.
President Bush plans to reactivate his reelection campaign’s network of donors and activists to build pressure on lawmakers to allow workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes in the stock market, according to Republican strategists.
White House allies are launching a market-research project to figure out how to sell the plan in the most comprehensible and appealing way, and Republican marketing and public-relations gurus are building teams of consultants to promote it, the strategists said.
The campaign will use Bush’s campaign-honed techniques of mass repetition, never deviating from the script and using the politics of fear to build support — contending that a Social Security financial crisis is imminent when even Republican figures show it is decades away.
Bush aides said that in addition to mobilizing the Republican faithful and tapping the power of business, they plan to target minority voters who have not been able to afford to save and might be open to the argument that the president’s plan would turn them into investors. The campaign will also court younger voters, including many Democrats, who would potentially benefit the most from the change.
The campaign analogy works, but only half-way. Bush will rally the faithful, hold exclusive events, talk only to those with whom he agrees, and scare voters with deceptive claims. In other words, the Social Security campaign will be just like the presidential campaign.
But there’s the rub: Social Security is not John Kerry.
Bush excels in campaigns in part because he’s a surprisingly good candidate. But the underpinning for his success, though his gang would never admit it, is enmity for the enemy. The clear majority of Bush’s campaign pitch in 2004 was negative — Kerry’s a flip-flopper, Kerry is weak on defense, Kerry looks French, Kerry will turn over American security to a “global test,” Kerry voted to raise taxes 350 times, Kerry embraces “socialized medicine,” Kerry likes spitballs, and so on. In all, 71% of BC04’s TV ads were entirely anti-Kerry attacks.
The public was skeptical about a Massachusetts liberal and Bush turned their doubts into distrust through deceptive attacks. The one-and-only play worked.
Clearly, Bush wants to use the exact same tack in this new campaign. Saying that the system will go “bankrupt” and is facing an imminent “crisis” is about as accurate as saying Kerry voted to “gut” the intelligence budget, but the White House assumes that if the public could be fooled into believing nonsense about Kerry, it can be fooled into accepting bogus arguments about Social Security.
But the analogy doesn’t entirely work. People like Social Security. It’s the most successful and popular domestic program in American history. Bush can’t “go negative” against a system that most people cherish.
Just as importantly, the White House is dealing with a completely different audience. In the presidential campaign, Bush spoke to regular ol’ Republican voters outside of Washington. He needed to convince them to give him a second term and reject Kerry. Now, however, his audience is 535 members of Congress — who aren’t as easily fooled.
To be sure, the public is hardly irrelevant here. Both sides of the debate will work aggressively to convince the electorate that their side of the privatization argument is the right one. But ultimately, the fate of the White House scheme is in the hand of lawmakers, who will either vote for it or against it. If the president believes the power of his persuasion is so strong that there will be a groundswell of support, with people demanding, “Privatize Social Security!” he’s delusional.
Members of Congress, no matter how ideological they are, will know enough about Bush’s plan to weigh it on the merits — and they know enough to reject the absurd claim that the sytem is going bankrupt. To be sure, there will be plenty of lawmakers (led by Tom Cole) who will support gutting Social Security simply because Bush asks them to, but they will be a minority.
At this point, Dems of all persuasions know Bush’s plan is scam. By some accounts, as many as 40 Republican House members know the same and many more “scared to death” of moving forward on a plan that adds $2 trillion to the debt and cuts Social Security benefits in half in the coming decades.
Can “Bush’s campaign-honed techniques” change that? Considering how much more popular Social Security is than John Kerry, I like our chances.