Most Americans don’t trust President Bush’s motives when it comes to overhauling Social Security, a recent Harris Interactive poll shows.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/i>.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I sometimes wonder if the White House even realizes what a fiasco this is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}