But Bush won't be alone. Back in June, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neillannounced plans to raise $20 million from business groups to launch a grass-rootscampaign to promote privatization. The campaign has yet to materialize. "Ihaven't seen a single sign of that," says Gerry Kavanaugh, policy director of theDemocratic National Committee (DNC). O'Neill "went around and made some speechesand gave some comments," says Steve Robinson, the chief Social Security analystfor Senate Republicans. "I think it just didn't get any traction." And in lateOctober, GOP Congressman Jim DeMint of South Carolina, backed by the RepublicanHouse leadership, introduced his own middle-of-the-road Social Securityplan--effectively going over the commission's head.
So when Bush became the latest Republican to back away from the commission,its critics were ecstatic. For months they had warned that conservative-stylereform would require either unpopular tax increases or equally unpopular cuts inbenefits. Now it looked like the White House had come to the same conclusion."They're essentially coming up with a way for [Bush] not to be tied to what theyproduce, so that he can't be attacked," crowed Hans Riemer, an analyst withCampaign for America's Future (CAF). "They clearly miscalculated the politics ofit," says the DNC's Kavanaugh. "I think they're rethinking the entireproposition."
This isn't the way it was supposed to be. From the beginning,after all, the defining feature of the commission was predictability. To keep thecommission on a tight leash, the White House installed as its executive directorChuck Blahous, a Lindsey aide at the National Economic Council. The commissionitself was more reliable than credible: Though all 16 appointees favoredprivatization of one kind or another, only co-chair Daniel Patrick Moynihan,World Bank consultant Estelle James, University of Pennsylvania professor OliviaMitchell, and former Minnesota Congressman Bill Frenzel rank among the top tierof Social Security wonks. And the commission as a whole drew heavily on thelibertarian Cato Institute--the most ardent privatizers in Washington--not onlyfor its members (five of whom have past Cato connections) but also for its staff(including press secretary Randy Clerihue, a former Cato flack, and Andrew Biggs,a former Cato analyst).
But the commission's very predictability has proven to be its biggestliability. In July the commission released an interim report assessing SocialSecurity in terms so absurdly pessimistic--the system, it said, was "broken"--andeasily refuted that, after weathering a torrent of criticism, the commissionersthemselves agreed to changes. And why not? The report had been written primarilyby the commission's staff, and many sections appeared to have been cribbedstraight from Biggs's Cato policy papers. "We had not seen the draft that becamepublic before it became public," concedes Mitchell. "There were a number ofpeople who would have benefited from having more input." But this was business asusual at the commission. Riemer, who frequently checks the commission's monthlypublic document folders, says that as late as August "there was no evidence ofany deliberation among the members of the commission--no memos or correspondencefrom any commission member to the group."
Attempts to skew the witness panels in favor of private accounts (which wasopposed, according to The Washington Post, in a majority of the writtenstatements solicited by the commission) have produced their own brand ofhilarity. In order to get two out of three witnesses on a "Social Security Reformand Women" panel to speak for privatization, the commission staff stacked thedeck by selecting Suzanne Taylor, a past president of the National Association ofWomen Business Owners (NAWBO), and Eloise Anderson, a welfare reform expert atthe conservative Claremont Institute. But the NAWBO has only about 8,000 members(compared with, say, 500,000 in the National Organization for Women). The extentof Anderson's previous expertise on Social Security consisted of a chat sessionon the Town Hall Web site in which she described Social Security as "the motherof all welfare programs" and recommended that "it should be killed and replacedwith individual account programs."
Similarly, a panel called "Social Security and Young Americans" featured onespeaker--CAF's Riemer--against privatization and three speakers in favor. Two ofthe latter group came from the same camp: Meredith Bagby, founder of the youthgroup Third Millennium, and Maya MacGuineas, currently a fellow at the NewAmerica Foundation but also a member of Third Millennium's board. The third wasAmy Holmes, a former "director of campus outreach" at the conservativeIndependent Women's Forum who had no obvious Social Security expertise. Itshowed: She spent much of her allotted time attacking feminist groups, and hertestimony was an almost verbatim recitation of the testimony she delivered to theHouse Ways and Means Committee over two years ago.
Of course, most of Washington had long since concluded that thecommission would be stacked. Few, however, expected it to be so politicallyobtuse. Liberal groups were pleasantly surprised, for instance, that only a fewhours after the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) issued a stingingcritique of the interim report, the commission staff issued a written rebuttalsigned by Parsons and Moynihan. "They did exactly the wrong thing," says PeterOrszag, a Brookings Institution fellow who helped write the CBPP document. "Theyelevated us and demeaned the two co-chairs by responding to us."
At one press conference, Parsons and Moynihan seemed unable to agree onwhether the Social Security Trust Fund actually existed. Parsons hewed to theWhite House line that Social Security's assets were an accounting fiction,telling reporters, "There's no there there." Moynihan, sensitive to the danger oftelling Americans their lifetime contributions to the fund had suddenly vanished,kept contradicting him. Social Security, Moynihan pointed out, "represents anobligation that the federal government will honor."
Other commissioners seem to have fallen for their own spin. Sam Beard--theJack Kemp of private accounts--remains convinced that women, blacks, andHispanics will come around to Social Security reform, notwithstanding thesteadfast opposition of nearly every major feminist and civil rights group in thecountry. "There's a big gap," Beard insists, "between what I find at the grassroots and what I find among the leadership."
Indeed, it's telling that Beard, in arguing that privatization has wideappeal, cites fellow Democrats Moynihan, Bill Clinton, Chuck Robb, and BobKerrey. As a whole, the privatization movement seems stuck in the mid-1990s, whenRobb, Kerrey, and other prominent centrist Democrats flirted openly with SocialSecurity privatization. But Clinton eventually dropped the idea, while Robb andKerrey have since left the Senate. Many Democrats who still support full orpartial privatization, like Louisiana Senator John Breaux, are notably absentfrom the current debate. Even Moynihan has been missing in action. After heskipped a hearing in October, the White House spent several days squelchingrumors that he was going to quit; he has devoted little of his enormous prestigeto defending the commission's work.
"What's to defend?" argues William Galston, a former Clinton adviser and aninfluential New Democrat. "If the point of the commission was to genuinely andopenly explore options, then that commission was clearly poorly designed," hesays. "If the point of the commission, on the other hand, was to build broadsupport for an outcome that had been foreordained--well, it was poorlyconstructed for that purpose, too."
Some privatization activists, of course, blame the White House'slethargy on September 11. But it's clear that the commission's work has longinspired something less than confidence among many Republicans, particularly inthe House. In August, Bush strategist Karl Rove promised a second push from theWhite House. But Rove has faced stiff resistance from Virginia Congressman TomDavis, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).
Although the NRCC won the special elections in Virginia and Arkansas thisyear, Democrats nearly pulled off upsets in both contests by pounding theiropponents on Social Security; in the Arkansas race, Democrat Mike Hathorn usedthe issue to whittle a 32-point deficit down to a mere four points. Now, Davis isworried about his candidates being saddled with the commission's reform plan in2002. And even when the commission does issue its "range of options," saysRobinson, moving a plan through Congress would require "a major, concerted publiceducation campaign run by the White House"--a campaign Bush seems disinclined towage. "Everybody knows what the options are, for God's sake," says Galston."What's the point in producing another options paper? I think it was just afailed enterprise."
But the commission and its supporters are, as usual, on-message. "I neverreally saw our mission as presenting a piece of legislation ready-to-go," saysOlivia Mitchell. Cato has defended the commission's switch, as has theconservative Heritage Foundation. Representative Charlie Stenholm, one of thecommission's few Democratic allies, now says that "coming through with one or twoor three plans ... would be a very appropriate action on their part." Yet inearly November he signed a letter stating that while a report detailing optionswould be a "useful educational tool," he and congressional supporters "firmlybelieve that the commission should offer a specific recommendation as well."
Sam Beard muses that Bush "is the first sitting United States president thathas said, 'Updating Social Security and modernizing it for the twenty-firstcentury is a top priority of this administration.'" He may also be the last.
