Who's the President's Anti-Model When It Comes to Social Security Reform?

Politicians are as likely to operate from anti-models as they from models.

For example, Ronald W. Reagan is a model for George W. Bush. He tries to portray himself as an optimist and as a man of the land, as prone to "clearing brush" as Reagan was. Bush understands, as Reagan understood from observing his major model for political leadership, Franklin Roosevelt, that Americans like optimistic leaders who blow "certain trumpets."

But the President's father probably also represents an anti-model for him. Bush the Younger, as a loyal operative for his dad, saw the utility of maintaining a tight relationship with the then-emerging Christian Right, something the elder Bush was slow in realizing. George W. Bush also saw the mistake his father made in underestimating the degree to which Americans value presidential sensitivity to downturns in their economic positions. The President has been intent on avoiding the pitfalls that ambushed his father, denying the elder Bush a second term.

In the discussion over possible Social Security reform, the President appears to be deriving lessons from another presidential antimodel. But it's not clear whether that will be an asset to him or not.

The President made it clear in his first post-election press conference that he intended to use his political "capital" to advance Social Security reform in his second term.

There has, however, been something missing in this discussion: Mr. Bush has advanced no specifics.

He points out that there is an impending crisis in the Social Security system (a thesis disputed by some), declares that all current recipients will be guaranteed their current benefits no matter what reforms are promulgated, and states that personal accounts should be part of the mix of reforms. He's also said that he's totally open to various possible reform proposals, including taxing those making $90,000.00 a year or more. But that's it.

To me, it appears that the President is trying to avoid the mistakes of Bill Clinton when he tackled a nearly-analogous issue.

Early in his first term, Mr. Clinton made health care reform a signature issue of his presidency. First Lady Hillary Clinton was put in charge of a task force that was to formulate and then usher a very specific proposal through the Congress. Who can forget Mr. Clinton's State of the Union message in which he brandished a Health Care Security card and enumerated elements of his proposal?

The Clinton Health Care proposal, with all its details, aroused a lot of different interest groups, making it tough to pass. What he got was a mere shadow of his original ambitious program.

With Social Security reform, Mr. Bush is taking on an even bigger issue than health care reform. Social Security, of course, is known as the third rail of American politics, bringing certain political death to any who would dare mess with it.

It's always been deemed particularly deadly for Republicans. The party opposed it back in the days of Franklin Roosevelt, incurring disdain. Barry Goldwater demonstrated just how sacred the federal pension system is when he lost spectactularly to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, after some of his rhetoric about the program allowed the Johnson campaign to convince many that Goldwater would dismantle it.

While the President has been trying to put Social Security on the front-burner and has talked up personal retirement accounts, I believe that his general avoidance of specifics is designed to help him get something passed, no matter how modest. For that, it would seem, he hopes to derive credit without spending too much of his political capital.

But this approach is running into problems.

The first is the nothing ventured, nothing gained element of presidential leadership. Only with great risk and boldness is the President apt to get anything worthy of the label "Social Security reform" through the Congress. It will take genuine use of his vaunted political capital to get Social Security reform passed.

And he must do it this year or forget about it. Given the accelerated shelf life of presidential second terms in this era of the perpetual campaign, a mid-term obsessed Congress in 2006 and one that will be obsessed with the presidential campaign in 2007 and 2008, it's now or never for Mr. Bush to get Social Security reform passed.

The President won't get any reform through short of putting everything on the line. Mr. Bush has been known for this in the past. His reluctance to go full-tilt on this issue is hurting his cause.

So far, although deserving of high marks for even bringing the subject up, the President hasn't said, "I stake my presidency on this," something he can afford to do as a second-termer.

A second reason the President is having problems is the reluctance of the Republican Congress to touch the third rail.

Whether justified or not, members of the House and Senate are hearing negative comments from constituents, especially seniors, who regard Social Security sacrosanct. Today's seniors, who are vastly more likely than previous generations of retirees to carry large debt loads, are not likely to go along with any changes in a system on which they rely so heavily.

The third problem is that it's difficult to get agreement to any individual component of a reform package or even about what constitutes reform.

Even those who advocate individual retirement accounts say that their establishment may be irrelevant to the long-range solvency of Social Security.

Proposals to tax larger incomes get shot down, as they were recently by conservative members of the House and Senate, after the President suggested he might be open to them. (Currently, Social Security is funded by a 12.4 percent tax, which is shared equally by employers and employees, on the first $90,000 of annual wages. Income above that level is not taxed. While conservatives like Tom DeLay vehemently rejected this idea when the President recently opened the door to it, it should be said that Rick Santorum, himself an ardent conservative and the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, said today that he was open to the idea.)

There's great hesitation about raising the minimum retirement age by one year every decade, putting the system more in line, say its adherents, with increasing life expectancy. Many see this as a way of taking away benefits that workers have earned.

And former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's proposal to have the federal government deposit $2000.00 annually in accounts for every citizen until they're eighteen has been greeted with interest by some, rejection by others.

The point is that the President is confronted with a Catch-22:

• Without some proposal on the table, he's likely to get just a bunch of people saying, "No," killing Social Security reform by a million little cuts.
• But a specific plan is likely to get the Clinton Health Care treatment.

The President now has no choice but to slog it out, showing flexibility on specifics, almost negotiating legislation in public. Perhaps in displaying flexibility, he'll avoid being wounded either by the Democrats or his fellow Republicans.

But it won't be easy and no matter how things turn out, you have to give Bush credit for tampering with the third rail of American politics.

The only problem is that in order to get the job done, he may have to do a lot more than tamper. Shy of going all-out, he's likely to end with a worst-case scenario from his perspective: no reform coupled with loss of power to get an already-rebellious Congress to do what he wants to do with other possible legislation.

If the President loses this fight, it may very well be because he chose the wrong anti-model in Bill Clinton.