A Battle Progressives Can Win

This article is reprinted from The American Prospect.

President Bush claims the 2004 election gave him a mandate to pursue his No. 1 second-term priority, the partial privatization of Social Security. But the voters don't think so. Only 35 percent of Americans think Bush has a mandate "to allow workers to invest some of their Social Security taxes in the stock market," while 51 percent say he has no such mandate, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted just after Bush's re-election victory.

But Bush is gambling his winning streak on persuading a majority in Congress to vote to dismantle the most popular and successful social-insurance program in the nation's history. And, even though he and his allies are still debating crucial and very controversial details, Bush has pledged to get legislation through Congress this year (before the 2006 midterm election year begins).

For progressives, the battle for Social Security represents a rare opportunity to stop the newly re-elected president dead in his tracks, to demonstrate the bankruptcy of his extreme conservative agenda, and to point to a new politics of "shared security" around which we can build a new majority for change. Winning won't be easy, but a powerful combination of progressive forces – national organizations, political funders and philanthropists, policy experts, and grass-roots and online networks (including veterans of the 2004 elections) – are coming together.

In tackling Social Security, Bush has set a much more difficult goal than anything he attempted in his first four years. His tax cuts were heavily skewed to the rich and his Medicare prescription-drug plan gave a bonanza to the HMOs and drug industry, but any senator or representative who voted for them could tell voters, "I got you a tax cut," or "I got you a new drug benefit." A Bush plan that cuts Social Security benefits in order to finance risky speculation in the stock market – while adding $2 trillion to the national debt over 10 years – would require a much more tortured explanation by any senator or representative foolhardy enough to vote for it.

The whole effort to block Bush will stand or fall on massive public education. That's because the more people learn about privatization, the worse it looks. In Bush's first term, Republicans were solidly united behind their president while Democrats were divided. Now, congressional Republicans are worried and splintered, uncertain whether walking the privatization plank will violate their conservative principles or undermine their chances for re-election. And so far, Democrats are pretty unified.

For progressives, victory requires getting enough votes – either defeating the Bush plan outright in both houses or sustaining a filibuster in the Senate by getting at least 41 firm "no" votes. To date, not one of the 45 Democrats in the new Senate has defected to the privatizers (and their new leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, is working to keep it that way). By contrast, several of the 55 Republicans have expressed serious doubts about supporting the president on Social Security.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi hopes to keep her 203 House Democrats united and win over at least 15 Republicans. For every Democrat who defects (so far only one, Allen Boyd of Florida, has), anti-privatizers will need to win over another Republican. But this time, it's Republicans who are shaky. Tom Davis, chairman of the House Republican Campaign Committee, told The Wall Street Journal that "roughly 30 House Republicans, including himself, are already inclined to oppose Mr. Bush" on Social Security.

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The president's strategy is familiar from the run-up to his invasion of Iraq: Manufacture a sense of crisis and then accuse critics of irresponsibly exposing Americans to danger, this time not weapons of mass destruction but the equally mythical claim that Social Security will soon "go bankrupt." Once the crisis atmosphere is established, doubters can be intimidated, and extreme measures, like cutting guaranteed benefits, can be justified because they can't be guaranteed any longer anyway.