Greg Anrig, writing on the New America Foundation's shockingly awful plan to reform Social Security (how about higher taxes and lower benefits!?), says:
At the outset of the New America proposal, the authors write, "the three of us - former aides to President Clinton, Senator McCain, and President Bush - did an experiment to see if we could develop a reform plan that we all could support." Please. All three (New America's Maya MacGuineas is the third) have long supported privatization. That's the kind of disingenuousness that characterizes today's conservative movement. An institution that calls itself progressive has no business behaving the same way.
See, this is the whole problem. Presidents and prominent politicians have, literally, thousands of aides. They're not all in the room at any given time and they may never even interact with the head guy himself, but they're still aides. And while the vast majority tend to support their boss's endeavors and ideology, a certain fraction apply because they need jobs, because they're former friend would now be their superior, or because they have crucially needed administrative skills. And of that group, a certain fraction are simply philosophically disconnected from the team that they serve.
David Gergen was an aide to Reagan, Nixon, and Bill Clinton. Richard Clarke was an aide to Reagan, George HW Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush. Depending on the context, either one could make a proposal look progressive or conservative by invoking his time as an aide to Reagan or Clinton. Neat trick, isn't it?
Being an aide to someone doesn't mean you're a liberal, it means you worked for them. And trying to cloak a privatization proposal in bipartisan warm-and-fuzzies because one of the conceptualizers once worked in a building with Bill Clinton is simply irritating. The New America Foundation is so better than that.
