Big secret! And remember: You heard it here first. Democrats need a win in Washington. The need something, anything, to get the bad taste of the last four years out of the mouth and to reassure themselves that they actually have a purpose beyond their recent role as GOP fodder.
Ironically, as President George W. Bush -- their nemesis of the moment -- begins his second term, he may be providing Democrats with exactly the opportunity for the little victory they need to get their blood moving again.
By choosing Social Security as the top agenda item in his second term, Bush is reprising the common Republican strategy of casting himself as the reformer up against the entrenched and decadent status quo. The result in the past has been that Democrats then find themselves in the uncomfortable position of defending this or that government program, which, almost by definition, represents the status quo. The defense tends to be lame and tired, largely because the defenders often assume that the intrinsic value of what they are defending is obvious and overwhelming. And they lose.
They lose because lots of Americans have been conditioned to think of government programs as “fraud, waste, and abuse” -- the spoils of which go to other people. The challenge for Bush is convincing enough people to believe that this is also true for Social Security. And that is a very tall order. It is also where the opening is for Democrats. The dynamic on Social Security is entirely different: For starters, it is a government program that people love, because it loves you back each month in the mail; the people who love it most are the ones who vote the most: seniors. Even the blogging on the progressive liberal side of the issue has taken on a depth and focus that is surprising -- in some cases, forcing Democratic members of Congress to declare or clarify their positions on the private accounts proposed by the president.
And that could make all the difference in the world, because the public relations effort around the White House reform proposal is going to resemble nothing so much as a national tent revival.
“It's going to have to start with education,” says Representative Deb Pryce, the Ohioan who chairs the GOP House Conference.
And the p.r. war is where the battle will be won or lost. If the president can convince the country that Social Security is in a crisis, he wins. If Democrats can convince the United States that Bush is going to ruin a program that is really good , they win. The battle will be won not on some long, late night of vote-counting some time next fall but, rather, in the weeks and months ahead when Americans make up their minds about the magnitude and urgency of the problem with Social Security. Democrats seem to recognize that and are on an early offensive. And here is where there bloggers could do some damage to the White House.
“There is not a crisis in Social Security," says North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan, who heads the Democratic Policy Committee in the Senate. “This is an insurance program. It's not a 401(k).”
Dorgan also points out that the federal government spends about $70 billion per year supporting individual retirement accounts in the private sector, but they do not provide the safety net features of Social Security.
“We have to keep the security in Social Security,” says Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, who also made the leap from simply defending a program to articulating a set of values. “Look, we are Democrats. We are about making sure that the American promise is available to everybody, that if folks work hard and play by the rules that they will have that opportunity, and we believe that we're are in this together. And that is what Social Security all about. We are in this together.”
Their tough task, of course, is to convince a sharply divided, deeply partisan nation that we are, indeed, all in this together.
The latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll shows that 48 percent of Americans agree with the president's idea of creating private investment accounts as part of Social Security, while 48 percent do not. Only 40 percent of those polled believed that Bush would be able to fix Social Security during his second term; this is where the Dems have their biggest opening.
And now, the obligatory But.
Pryce, the House GOP conference chair, puts her finger on the big problem for the Democrats. “I think people are going to be surprised at how engaged, how determined this president is going to be on this issue. He wants to win.”
And recent history suggests that when he wants to win, Democrats don't beat him. And, of course, at some point, they will have to offer a rational alternative to Bush's proposal if they are to have any chance of stopping his. As GOP strategist Dave Winston points out: “Something will always beat nothing.”
So they need something. They need to win!
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.
