[George W.] Bush’s efforts to sell his peculiar “privatization” remedy
for the Social Security ‘crisis’ haven’t been going well. Recent polls
show that Mr. Bush gets his lowest marks on his handling of that issue.
But, like any good snake oil salesman, he presses on. He’s been
crisscrossing the country telling people that Social Security is sick
and that only privatization will make it well.

His sales pitch has been characteristically Bushian – dismissive
of evidence and encased in syntax that is virtually impenetrable to logic.
Here’s what he said the other day:

“I’ve been reading the newspapers and been seeing some folks
saying ‘There’s not a problem, he’s just exaggerating.’ 

Well, I’m going to keep telling people we’ve got a problem
until it sinks in, because we’ve got one. You can’t dodge whether we have a
problem or not. Because, see, the next follow-on question to that is, if you’ve
got a problem, what do you Republicans and Democrats and a few independents
intend to do about it up there?’”

He also said that, under his proposed privatization fix,
income from personal accounts, goes to supplement the Social Security check
that you’re going to get from the federal government. “See, personal accounts
is an add-on to that which the government is going to pay you. It doesn’t
replace the Social Security system.”

That either means he doesn’t understand the plan he’s
proposed (always a possibility) or that he is outright lying (more likely). You
can’t pay full Social Security benefits and have part of the payroll tax going
into personal accounts at the same time. There’s just not enough money to go
around. The term “add-on” is generally used to mean a payment into a private
account above and beyond what now goes into the retirement system. That’s not
what Bush is not what Bush is proposing.

It’s always dangerous to assume that [George W.] Bush is as
dumb as he sounds. He gets what he wants too often to be written off as a
dunce. It’s far more likely that he’s deliberately trying to confuse and
frighten people about Social Security so that they’ll be stampeded into support
for his cockamamie privatization scheme.

And I wouldn’t bet against him. He’s calling his shock
troops into the battle. Business groups are ratcheting up multi-million-dollar
lobbying efforts and the airwaves will soon be filled with stories of Social
Security’s peril. (Like they care.) And the people who gave you the Swift Boat
veterans (remember them?) are joining the fight. They have been hired by USA
Next, a big-money conservative lobbying group, to trash AARP as they did John
Kerry.

They’re trying to brand the seniors lobbying group as a
left-liberal, gay marriage-loving cabal that is standing in the way of the
brave [Bush]’s efforts to save Social Security. You would think that absurd
on the face of it, but this bunch managed to convince a lot of voters that
Kerry’s Vietnam credentials (three purple hearts) weren’t as good as those of
Bush, who hid from the fray. Maybe they can convince people that AARP is a
bunch of hippies.

Personally, I doubt that Mr. Bush will get his plan enacted
this time around but he might get a piece of it now, then push for more later.
That’s the way the Conservative movement works: patiently, relentlessly.

Conservatives have been talking about getting rid of Social
Security for the past 35 years, ever since Barry Goldwater suggested it be made
voluntary. He was laughed out of the election in 1968 but here, 37 years later,
we’ve got a two-term president who’s pushing privatization – voluntary Social
Security by another name – and no one’s laughing.

This so-called Conservative movement is not conservative, of
course; it’s reactionary. It looks longingly back on a time when retirement was
the exclusive province of the rich.

For the rest of us, it was work ‘til you die and if you
couldn’t, hope you died young. That’s the golden sunset Captain Bush is
steering us into now, or trying to.

Donald Kaul recently retired as Washington
columnist for the Des Moines Register. He has covered the foolishness in our
nation’s capital for 29 years, winning a number of modestly coveted awards
along the way.  Kaul's columns can be found at MinutemanMedia.org.

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