Internal Bleeding

Just last year, congressional Republicans had a powerful scapegoat in Congress. Anything they couldn’t accomplish, they blamed on Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). Unable to confirm President George W. Bush’s controversial judicial nominees? It was the “obstructionist” Daschle’s fault. Couldn’t get the energy bill through the Senate? Daschle was to blame.

And then Daschle lost his re-election bid last fall; the same elections that increased Republican numbers in both the House and the Senate. And with his “mandate” from voters, Bush has decided to pursue an unusually ambitious domestic agenda in his second term, the centerpiece of which is a partial dismantling of Social Security to create private investment accounts.

The biggest obstacle for Bush this year is not any Democratic congressional leader, however. It’s the Republicans in Congress who are thinking about their next election, something Bush doesn’t have to worry about ever again. “The real fireworks this year will be between the GOP Congress and the Republican White House,” says Brad Bannon, a Washington-based Democratic consultant. “Bush wants to leave a legacy and there’s no better legacy than to dismantle the FDR New Deal legacy, even if it destroys the congressional majority in his own party.”

Congressional Republicans, uncharacteristically, have spoken out against Bush’s Social Security plan. House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), whose committee will pen reform in the House, told Tim Russert of NBC on Jan. 23 that Social Security is a “problem,” not a crisis. And at an earlier forum, he said the White House proposal would be a “dead horse.”

Thomas is by no means the lone Republican on this. Last month, Rep. Jim Ramstad (R-Minn.) told Minnesota Public Radio: “Right now, to be very candid with you, we don’t have broad Republican support, let alone bipartisan support for [Bush’s] plan that was outlined during the campaign.” And Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.) told The Washington Post, “Why stir up a political hornet’s nest — when there is no urgency?”

Perhaps they are reading the polling numbers that the president professes to despise. A Newsweek poll released Feb. 5 shows that 56 percent of voters think creating private investment accounts — in which Americans can put some of their Social Security money in the stock market — is “too big a risk,” while 36 percent of voters think it’s a “necessary risk.” A Quinnipiac University poll released Feb. 2 shows younger voters — who won’t have to worry about Social Security benefits for decades and vote in low numbers — support the plan by a 61 to 35 percent margin. Baby boomers also back it 53 to 43 percent, but older voters — who turn out in high numbers — oppose it 56 to 34 percent. Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told the Associated Press that public momentum needs to build for the plan in the next 90 days, or else lawmakers will be discouraged “from moving ahead.”

That may not be the only thing discouraging them, however. Because Bush has not set forward a specific plan for how to go about rescuing Social Security, he gets credit for raising the problem but won’t get criticized if nothing happens. His proposal won’t fail because he didn’t present Congress with a detailed proposal in the first place. He still gets points for his legacy. It’s a win-win.

Who will get blamed if nothing happens? It’s hard for Republicans to blame Democrats, when they aren’t in the majority (as in 2002) and they don’t have a leader who’s been pilloried in the press for standing in the GOP’s way (as in 2004). Instead, voters might take out their anger on the people who didn’t do anything about the plan — and with the party’s leader off the ballot, that means congressional Republicans.