Social Security - The Democrats' Chance

Listening to some of the Sunday morning talk shows yesterday (thank god for XM radio, which has CSPAN Radio, and replays many of these shows without commercials Sunday night), I sensed that the Republicans are very scared about the prospect of Social Security "reform" being an issue that they take a major hit on at the mid-terms in 2006. Some were saying that they fear losing their majorities in both houses (although that seems impossible). On the other hand, Talking Points Memo continues to document the number of people in the so-called "Fainthearted Faction" of the Democratic Party (those willing to sell-out SS for some variation of the Bush plan). Meanwhile, Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly continues to show how secure SS really is, and what a fraud is being run by Bush, probably in the greater goal of actually destroying SS rather than "save" it.

Two thoughts. One, if this is the issue with legs in this country, while we are spending hundreds of billions on a fraudulent war, then it speaks very poorly of our country. Imagine, we just had our president reelected while all of this crap was going on, but, god no, you cut my benefits by a drop and I'm willing to drop the president and his party at a drop of a hat. Waste hundreds of billions so Bush could call himself a "war president," lie about weapons of mass destruction, engage in the wholesale destruction of all of our longstanding previous alliances, embarrass our country beyond belief by deciding that torture and indefinite detention of suspects is acceptable (after decrying it in the Soviet Union all these years), lose jobs for a term for the first time since Herbert Hoover, all of these things pale in comparison to a possible cut in retirement benefits. And Bush calls our country a generous nation?

Finally, if this issue is so toxic (it's not called the 3rd rail of American politics for nothing), whey aren't the Democrats going to war on the issue. They've dropped the ball on every conceivable issue up to now, especially the war and tax cuts, but supporting them in numbers large enough to call Bush's legislative successes "bi-partisan." Why not coalesce at this point and fight the political equivalent of a street to street battle against this, something most people seem predisposed to oppose in the first place. This should be the time and place where liberals re-discover their backbone, not where they give bipartisan cover to another idiotic Bush proposal.