There's a lot of chatter in the beltway about whether or not the president is going to put social security on the menu in the State of the Union. Evidently, there is a real debate going on amongst his advisors, which is depressing, to say the least.
Now that Republicans control the House and Obama is facing reelection, the political dynamic is different and liberal groups fear the president might be willing to cut a deal on Social Security. Labor unions and liberal groups worry Obama could endorse a boost in the retirement age or a change in cost-of-living adjustments when he discusses strategies for reducing the federal deficit later this month.
“Everybody and their cousin is talking to the White House about this,” said a Democratic strategist involved in the lobbying campaign. “Nobody in the progressive world thinks the president ought to endorse the Bowles-Simpson Social Security stuff. People feel very strong about it and have been working it very hard.
“No one knows for sure where the White House is,” said the strategist. “Social Security has been the crown jewel of progressive policy over the last century. Just because so many people voted for the Bowles-Simpson plan and Obama hasn’t said anything specifically about the Social Security recommendations, groups are doing an all-out push.”
Everyone who reads this blog knows that I have been worried about this since before the inauguration when Obama announced his desire to strike a Grand Bargain. And since the president's Catfood Commission went beyond its mandate and offered up "reforms" to social security and the whole world has embarked on Austerity hysteria, I think it's sadly still on the agenda. Certainly press reports indicate that the White House is considering it.
I have long believed that Obama wanted to do this. All you have to do is look back to 2007 to see that this has been on his mind:
Lately, Barack Obama has been saying that major action is needed to avert what he keeps calling a “crisis” in Social Security — most recently in an interview with The National Journal. Progressives who fought hard and successfully against the Bush administration’s attempt to panic America into privatizing the New Deal’s crown jewel are outraged, and rightly so.
But Mr. Obama’s Social Security mistake was, in fact, exactly what you’d expect from a candidate who promises to transcend partisanship in an age when that’s neither possible nor desirable.
To understand the nature of Mr. Obama’s mistake, you need to know something about the special role of Social Security in American political discourse.
Inside the Beltway, doomsaying about Social Security — declaring that the program as we know it can’t survive the onslaught of retiring baby boomers — is regarded as a sort of badge of seriousness, a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough-minded you are.
And it's central to the Grand Bargain strategy.
On the other hand, the president has made many promises to protect Social Security as well:
As a president, he needs to ensure that the battered people of America have a decent chance to retire in at least livable poverty. It's not too much to ask. As a party leader, he needs to understand that the day the Democratic Party abandons the protection of social security as a defining principle is the day that the New Deal dies. I can't imagine he wants that as a legacy, but that's what it will be. Let's hope he thinks better of this Grand Bargain and goes with the promises he's made in that video.