Your Cheatin' Heart
The War on Social Security isn't going quite as planned for President Bush. Despite the prefabricated townhall meetings that this cowardly administration continues to trot out in front of CSPAN, a great majority of folks have gotten the message: there isn't a Social Security crisis that is so large that we need to destroy it and turn to private accounts that gamble on the stock market.

For a view into one of Bush's Social Security townhalls, check out the Daily Show from 23 February (titled Tape Worm); it starts about three minutes into it. My favorite line from a member of the audience: "Whatever program you put out for Social Security, I'm fully behind it. I'm very happy to have you as President." Oh, and Bush just dropped a much ballyhooed townhall meeting in Germany on his current European vacation:

But on Wednesday, that town hall meeting will be nowhere on the agenda -- it's been cancelled. Neither the White House nor the German Foreign Ministry has offered any official explanation, but Foreign Ministry sources say the town hall meeting has been nixed for scheduling reasons -- a typical development for a visit like this with many ideas but very little time. That, at least, is the diplomats' line. Behind the scenes, there appears to be another explanation: the White House got cold feet. Bush's strategists felt an uncontrolled encounter with the German public would be too unpredictable.
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The Germans, though, insisted that a free forum should be exactly that. Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany's Ambassador to the United States, explained to the New York Times last week: "We told them, don't get upset with us if they ask angry questions." In the end, the town hall meeting was never officially dropped from the agenda of the trip -- instead it was dealt with in polished diplomatic style -- both sides just stopped talking about it.

But back to the exciting world of Social Security. It's not just Democrats who aren't giving Bush's privatization plans a warm welcome--it's his base of social conservatives. Remember the moral values election we just had? Here's a good piece from Salon:

People in red states, particularly social conservatives, aren't clamoring for privatization. Although there have been no definitive, large-scale state-by-state surveys on Social Security, a handful of scattered red-state surveys show the president's proposal faltering in usually friendly territory. Such numbers aren't surprising, since red states are disproportionately made up of older, poorer Americans, people who greatly benefit from Social Security in its current form and don't want to see it monkeyed with.

But there's another reason red-state voters may be upset about the Social Security plan: It isn't what they thought they were pushing for when they joined Team Bush. Among social conservatives, the popular explanation for Bush's handy victory in November is "moral values": Bush didn't win because people appreciated his plan on Social Security but because he stoked the passions of the pious and the prudish with his call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. While that theory has been pretty well shot down by people outside the religious right (foreign policy and economic issues, most analysts say, were probably more important to voters than moral-values issues), the conservative movement's leading lights still maintain that Bush won only because religious people put him in office. Some of these leaders don't seem pleased that the president is now spending his political capital on Social Security reform rather than on a crusade to reform the American soul.

They include Gary Bauer, a former presidential candidate and the head of the group American Values. "Regardless of which side of the Social Security debate you are on, real 'social security' -- that which truly makes society secure -- has less to do with retirement benefits and financial entitlements than it does with protecting and promoting our most vital social institutions," Bauer wrote recently in WorldNetDaily. Bauer belongs to a loose federation of right-wing operatives known as the Arlington Group. In a letter to the White House that was leaked to the New York Times, that group vented its frustration over the White House's legislative goals, warning that if Bush didn't push family-values issues, religious people could withhold their support for the Social Security plan.
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Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail maven who is considered one of the engineers of the religious right's political dominance, echoes Frank. "I'm not surprised. I'm disappointed," Viguerie says of Bush's focus on Social Security reform rather than social issues. "I'm not surprised because that's the way Republican presidents always do it -- they use and abuse conservatives. We're the shock troops. We do the heavy lifting, making the phone calls, walking the precincts." But when they win elections, "the Republican politicians in the Congress and in the White House have, as long as I can remember, taken the religious conservatives for granted. They treat us in a symbolic way, give us symbolism."

Bush is still trying to woo a wobbly Democrat or two, members of what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo refers to as the Fainthearted Faction, which currently includes such Senators as Joe Lieberman (CT) and Mary Landrieu (LA). But they might think twice about acquiescing to Bush's side, as noted in this USA Today story:

But some moderates who have voted at times with the president, such as Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, may be wary of crossing party lines again. Landrieu was one of nine Senate Democrats to vote for Bush's 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut in 2001. The next year, Republicans spent millions - unsuccessfully - to oust her.

Kos puts it succinctly:

Every Democrat who has provided the administration with "political cover" has been targetted for political assasination, like Jean Carnahan and Max Cleland. Rove sees compromise as weakness -- a sign that the compromising Democrat faces domestic pressures to play nice with the president.

If there was some political benefit from such cooperation, perhaps we could look the other way. But that hasn't been the history. This administration will try and destroy anything that lies in its path. The AARP, which played nice with Bush last year, is currently learning that lesson the hard way.

Oh, yeah, the AARP. They don't like the Social Security privatization plans at all, and have been vocal about it. So now the same advertising team that brought you the Swift Boat Veterans ads last summer are starting to drop some web ads that showed up on the American Spectator site for a few days earlier this week (and were quickly pulled down after creating a furious buzz--exactly what it was meant to do):



Now that's classy. The ad would have taken you to USA Next, an advocacy group for Social Security privatization. They told the NYTimes that it was a test, but it might have been something a little more litigious (and rather sloppy for such skilled evildoers... I mean marketers)--via Salon's War Room:

It turns out that the kissing fellows shown in a photograph in the ad are two real-life men who got married in Portland last year. Their photo ran in a local newspaper, and they say that USA Next was using it without either their permission or the newspaper's. The men are telling the story over at Daily Kos -- and the Kossacks are helping them strike back.