Democrats are so giddy with the momentum they have generated so far on Social Security that they are trying to transfer it to other issues.
This week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced a plan to expand economic opportunity to more Americans and strengthen the middle class. “The need to create jobs is urgent,” she said, holding up a front-page story from USA Today detailing the difficulty that unemployed people have finding work in this odd new economy.
Pelosi, flanked by two other senior Democrats, George Miller, the ranking member on the Education and Workforce Committee, and Jim Oberstar, the top Democrat on the Transportation Committee, launched a campaign to pass a highway bill and stop the outflow of U.S. manufacturing jobs. She said the effort was part of House Democrats' “New Partnership for America's Future,” which represents a Democratic commitment to “six core American values: prosperity, national security, fairness, opportunity, community, and accountability.”
In a Capitol conference room, lawmakers talked about the raising the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour and giving small businesses a 50-percent tax break to fund the costs of health care. “When people work full time, they ought to have wages that can support a family,” Pelosi said.
Oberstar said that the $300 billion-plus highway bill is a jobs program that, if it were passed by Memorial Day, would create almost half a million jobs by Labor Day and would generate a million more jobs by the end of the year. Oberstar, a Minnesotan in his 16th term, cited a 43-percent unemployment rate in the “sand and gravel sector.”
The highway bill, which enjoyed wide bipartisan support, died in the last Congress because the White House objected to its price tag of $318 billion. Oberstar chastised the administration for getting in the way of such bipartisan agreement. “The White House needs to lead, follow or get out of the way,” he said, “or we will pave them over.”
Sand and gravel humor.
While House Democrats were sharing their deepest concerns about the state of the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was on the other side of Capitol Hill telling senators that, “although the long-run challenges confronting the U.S. economy are significant, I fully anticipate that they will ultimately be met and resolved.”
Democrats are a little skeptical, pointing to the record trade deficit and the constant replacement of high-paying manufacturing jobs by low-wage service jobs. “We are going from hard hats to paper hats,” Pelosi lamented.
While these are perennial Democratic themes, Democrats know they will have little or no opportunity to actually pass any legislation during this session of Congress. They also know that a lot of their best efforts will go toward stopping the White House and the GOP majority from getting everything they want.
But they know that they have to appear to stand for something, and not simply against the Republicans or the president, hence all the happy talk about core American values. The real core American value in play here is winning, and for now, Democrats see a chance to win on Social Security.
“We are beating the shit out of them on this,” says one senior Democratic aide. “They don't know what to do.”
And there is no question that as Congress heads home for the Presidents Day recess, Democrats seem to have gained the upper hand in the Social Security debate. Both sides are planning to use the recess to tout their respective positions, but Republicans seem more nervous. The White House and the party leadership have been trying to reassure members about getting behind the president's plan.
This week, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, who also managed the Bush-Cheney re-election effort, held a series of closed-door sessions with GOP senators, showing them how to talk about Social Security by showing them campaign footage in which the president talked about it.
Still, Democrats think they have a winning hand, and they have not stopped beating up on President Bush. Senator Byron Dorgan went to the Senate floor earlier this week to put on the record that the president has been predicting Social Security's demise for a long time.
“President George W. Bush, then a candidate for Congress in Texas, said in 1978 … Social Security is going broke,” said Dorgan, “It'll be broke in 10 years, he said; it'll be broke by 1988. That was when he was a candidate for Congress. What was his remedy for that in 1978? Private accounts. Some things don't change very much.”
Bush lost that race for Congress, and Democrats are confident they can beat him in this Social Security fight. Says Representative Harold Ford Jr., the Tennessee Democrat: “We are not going to lose this one. Republicans don't want this either.”
And polling indicates that the president has a hard sell ahead of him with the American people. The most recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, conducted last weekend, found that nearly two-thirds of Americans think it would be wise to limit retirement benefits for wealthy people and to raise payroll taxes on those who make more money. The president has rejected both those ideas, and has only proposed fixing the Social Security problem by allowing younger workers, those under 55, to divert some of their payroll taxes into individual investment retirement accounts. The poll also found that Americans, by a margin of 2 to 1, do not want to reduce retirement benefits for those who are 55 now. By a similar margin, people are against raising the retirement age, and 57 percent are against reducing benefits for those who retire early.
Bush has made clear that he intends to pursue his Social Security overhaul the way he pursued re-election. So any confidence Democrats now feel about their chances have to be tempered with the knowledge that the Bushies know how to win, and the debate is likely to go on for the next year and a half. Having the upper hand is not necessarily the same as having a winning hand.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
