Public rejects Bush’s plan — and his motives

May 13, 2005

There’s hardly any point anymore in noting the polls showing the lack of support for Bush’s Social Security scheme. After a while, it becomes repetitious — the public hates the plan and every poll proves it.

The latest Harris poll offers similar data — 59% disapprove of Bush’s handling of Social Security, only 34% approve — but the data includes a twist that hasn’t received as much attention.

Most Americans don’t trust President Bush’s motives when it comes to overhauling Social Security, a recent Harris Interactive poll shows.

In fact, only 36% of all adults say Mr. Bush’s comments on saving and strengthening Social Security are his real motives for changing the program, while 49% believe his real agenda is to dismantle it.

This strikes me as a much bigger deal. The president has made privatizing Social Security the signature domestic policy initiative of his second term. The fact that the public has strongly rejected it — and Bush’s scheme grows less popular the more he talks about it — is a dramatic debacle for the White House.

But to hear Republicans tell it, Bush and the GOP will still win politically, even if the public hates the plan, because voters will reward those who have the “courage” to take this issue on. This poll suggests the opposite is true; the public not only questions the Bush approach on the merits, but believes the president is lying about his intentions.

Indeed, when respondents were asked, “Do you think that President Bush’s real agenda is to save and strengthen Social Security or to dismantle Social Security as we know it?” it wasn’t particularly close. It wasn’t just Dems — the breakdown for self-identified independents was also one sided, with 54% saying he’s trying to dismantle the problem, and only 29% believing he wants to strengthen the program.

In the first term, all Bush had was an inexplicable sense many Americans had that the president was honest and forthright. Now he’s not only pushing a plan everyone hates, the public also thinks Bush is full of it.

I sometimes wonder if the White House even realizes what a fiasco this is.

Keep in mind that this White House, its entire staff and all its minions really and truly believes that if they say something is so, it either is so now or will become so if they just keep repeating it over and over and over again.

Sort of like a mantra except that would be way too hippie.

Plus God does whatever they want so nothing else matters except that they want it and so it must be true. Ipso facto.

They’re totally in denial, of course, but that’s the way it is with the delusional.

  • Is this article only on the WSJ online? If so do you know which poll results that are looking at. I would like to see the whole thing.

  • Add this poll (that people think is lying about his motives to destroy Social Secutity) to the ones that show a majority now think Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq, and the ones that show a public shift in generic party identification AWAY from the Republicans of anywhere from 2% to 10%! It may be that the public is starting to wake up to REAL agenda of the Repugs, and they ain’t buying it anymore. And this is IN SPITE OF a lazy and lying and bought-off media that still shills for Bush.

    Maybe there is hope. Too bad that the mid-terms are still over 17 months away!

  • I think it was an early Republican who said: “You can fool all of the people some of the time. You can fool some of the people all the time. But you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

  • Bush is too busy riding his mountain bike during the work day to notice what the public thinks about his plans to “strengthen” social security.

  • The sad fact is they don’t give a damn what we the people want. They think they know best. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if by some miracle the Bush family could go broke.

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