The handwriting is not only on the wall on Social Security reform but it appears as if the wall is beginning to crumble: the latest poll seems to suggest that the more President George Bush pushes his plan that includes privatizing Social Security, the more his support nosedives.
The latest Washington Post poll underscores the administration’s failure — so far at least — to not only put together a working coalition in Congress on the issue, but a coalition of support in the general public itself. And some of it seems due to backlash against this administration’s past take-no-prisoners political style:
Barely a third of the public approves of the way President Bush is dealing with Social Security and a majority says the more they hear about Bush’s plan to reform the giant retirement system, the less they like it, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Bush’s overall job approval rating stood at 50 percent, unchanged from last month and nearly exactly where it was a year ago. Currently, 48 percent disapprove of the job Bush is doing as president.
So what can we conclude from this?
- Maybe Bush would get more support for his plan if he stopped campaigning and stopped talking about it.
- His overal support hasn’t grown or fallen much.
- Democrats have done a poor job exploiting his weaknesses because his poll numbers are unchanged. They shouldn’t think that because his poll numbers haven’t gone up they’ve done a terrific idea of presenting their case for being the party with better specific solutions.
More from the Post:
But on Social Security, the president’s popularity continues to decline. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they approved of the way Bush is handling Social Security, down three points since January and the lowest level of support for Bush on this issue ever recorded in Post-ABC polls.
Bush has made Social Security reform the cornerstone of his domestic policy agenda. But his efforts to win public support for his proposals to change the system appear to be having just the opposite effect, according to the poll.
Nearly six in 10–58 percent–say they are more inclined to oppose administration’s reform plans as they learn more about it. Only a third say they are more receptive to Bush’s proposals as more details become available.
But it gets worse. There are clear signs that what we have repeatedly said on this site about Democrats being gunshy of dealing with Bush is part of the obstacle to his building any coalition with conservative to moderate Democrats. The Wall Street Journal notes:
Of course, politics as well as policy explains Democrats’ unity. The Blue Dogs share with other Democrats a deep distrust of the Bush White House after bruising legislative and political battles of the first term. Conservative Democrats feel that keenly because they expected the president to work more with them, based on his bipartisan record as Texas governor.
Instead, they argue, he governed to please his own party conservatives, and acquiesced as Republicans ran the House so that “stifling deliberation and quashing dissent … became the standard operating procedure,” as House Democrats put it last week in a 147-page report of alleged abuses of power.
And worse:
The Blue Dogs are angry at Mr. Bush over the intensity of the president’s — and his party’s — campaigning against Democrats who backed him on tax cuts, the Iraq war and other issues. Casualties include a Blue Dogs founder, former Democratic Rep. Charles Stenholm of Texas, who had been a cosponsor of a bipartisan bill to make changes in Social Security similar to those the president seeks.
Conservative Democrats, with unusual passion, say trust is lacking. “It’s about credibility,” says Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi, who says lawmakers got faulty information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Medicare drug-benefit cost estimates and other issues. “So when this guy says, ‘We have a crisis in Social Security and trust me to fix it,’ the credibility isn’t there,” he says.
Then there’s the story’s final paragraph “kicker” that says a great deal:
But Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who has a private-accounts bill of his own, wonders whether the unity against Mr. Bush on Social Security is the “payback” that he says he and other Republicans warned the White House about. “For every action,” he says, “there’s a reaction.”
The bottom line is this: George Bush was a political powerhouse in Texas because of his ability to work with Democrats and to aggragate interests. To blame the poisonous atmosphere in Washington on the Democrats and Ted Kennedy is simplistic. It takes two to do the Texas two-step.
Centrists in both parties could play a key role in negotiating some kind of Social Security reform. But if the attitude is “all ideas are on the table but unless you give us the private accounts it’s really off the table” it won’t go far. And as long as this issue is being framed as a POLITICAL STRUGGLE so one side’s activists can wind up giving high fives due to its triumph, nothing will get done. The White House is framing this as a kind of must-win political battle of wills. Big mistake…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.