CORRECTION ON DIAMOND-ORSZAG. It's been brought to my attention that Thursday's gloss of the Diamond-Orszag Social Security plan is misleading in several respects. It does not "write off" the trust fund, and does contain important pre-2040 changes including revenues enhancements, higher disability benefits, survivor benefits, low income worker benefits, and expands the system to cover some new classes of employees, as well as the beginnings of other adjustments in benefit levels. Apologies to readers, and after the holidays I'll try and write a more complete (and more accurate) account of the plan.

--Matthew Yglesias

SIGNING OFF. TAPPED will be offline until Monday, January 3. Until then, Happy Holidays to all.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

WHAT IRAQIS WANT. The International Republican Institute has released new polling data on Iraq that I've just been pouring over. At first glance, the results look like good news for old-fashioned class-based populism. Iraqis tell the IRI their top two issues are jobs and healthcare, 65 percent say they'd like to see a "large role for [the] state in the economy," and by an overwhelming margin of 62-8 Iraqis prefer an "urban/cosmpolitan" party to a "rural/tribal" one.

In other respects, however, Iraqis look more red than blue. By a margin of 53-20 Iraqis want a "faith-based" party rather than a secular one. More substantively, the conventional wisdom that the mullah-backed United Iraqi Alliance has the inside track to victory seems supported by the fact that 33.2 percent say they will "follow all decrees issued by clerics concerning the elections," and a further 16.1 percent say the views of clerics will be a "major" factor in determining their vote. Just 12.7 percent say they don't care what the clerics say. Oddly, IRR chose not to do any polling on the specific question of who people are going to vote for. In general, Iraqi public opinion paints a brighter picture than it did in September, but a worse one than it did before the summer.

From the US perspective, the most important result is probably that our presence in the country continues to be very unpopular. On the other hand, people remain very concerned about the lack of security. The desire for the Americans to go home, and the desire for someone to do a better job of maintaining law and order are in significant tension. What Iraqis want is for the local security forces to improve their performance. But all experts think it will take years to accomplish that.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE PRO-FAMILY DEMOCRATS. Intrigued by Rep. Rahm Emanuel's comments in yesterday's Washington Post about the need to avoid being seen as the party of the status quo, I found this Dec. 8 op-ed by him in The New York Times, making the same general point but on a different set of issues:

In 2002 and 2004, Democrats were the party out of power and by definition should have been the party of change. Yet they failed to provide credible alternatives to Republican policies. In a presidential race during which 55 percent of Americans asked for a new direction, we...allowed ourselves to be positioned as the party of the status quo.

To regain the public's trust, we must offer new ideas to build a better future for all Americans, not just a favored few; ideas that contrast with the special-interest policies Republicans promote. The current tax debate provides such an opportunity.

Our tax system is broken. We live in a society espousing the principles of work and responsibility, yet our tax code penalizes those who work for a living while benefiting the well connected. Rather than resisting change in the tax code, Democrats should embrace it.

Four tax cuts in four years allowed Republicans to use the tax code to reward their benefactors by expanding loopholes and turning a blind eye to tax cheats. Their recent corporate tax "reform" bill, which sought to correct a $5 billion tax break became a $136 billion handout for corporate expatriates, importers of Chinese ceiling fans and Nascar track owners, while further shifting the tax burden on to working Americans.

Real tax reform, like the simplified family credit I've proposed, would reverse this trend. It replaces 2,000 pages of the tax code with 12 questions by combining the child credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the dependent exemption. In contrast to the two Republican tax ideas - a flat tax or a national sales tax - the simplified credit is pro-family, progressive and rewards work.

Rather than constantly playing defense, it would seem worthwhile for the Democrats to take Emanuel's suggestion and try to get out in front of the president and the GOP congress by picking a few key legislative changes and pushing them hard in the court of public opinion. Family policy is one critically important area on which to do this, both from a policy perspective and from a political one. Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and the women of the Senate have already proven themselves leaders in trying to make the tax-code more family friendly. But overall, voters with children have not adjudged the Democrats to be the party that's most on their side, perhaps because of perceived Democratic stances cultural issues.

That's a view that could be changed. Terry Neal's Washington Post online political column on Tuesday contained a trove of facts documenting the ways in which "GOP Corporate Donors Cash In on Smut" and are some of the nation's biggest distributors of pornography. So it sure looks like there's room for a unified Democratic assault on GOP-backed filth and tax policies that hurt families -- a joint cultural-economic push -- if only someone would step up to the plate and organize it.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CONSTITUTION STATE SPECULATION. The wires are reporting that former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland has copped a plea with federal prosecutors, raising the possibility for prison time for the disgraced Governor. Upon hearing this news, acting Governor, and my hometown’s hero, Lt. Gov. Jodi Rell, laid into her former boss:

“Simple words cannot express the deep personal disappointment I feel," Ms. Rell said in her statement. "While we knew that this day might come, we were never really prepared for the reality of it. Today the state of Connecticut was humiliated, and I, as John Rowland's former running mate and colleague, feel personally betrayed. When I first heard the news, I felt like I was punched in the gut."

Harsh words, but well deserved. I don’t doubt Rell’s sincerity here, as Rowland was a crook, but behind this public rebuke, I sense an embattled incumbent posturing to keep her seat in 2006. This will be very, very hard; her two potential Democratic foes are heroes of state politics. If State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut’s version of Elliot Spitzer) decided to run, he would almost certainly beat Rell. Of course, the two ton elephant here is Chris Dodd. If his rumblings about running the state turn out to be more real than rumored, Blumenthal would be wise not to challenge him in a primary and instead vie for Dodd’s vacant seat. Presumably, he would still face a tough race if Republican Congressman Chris Shays were his opponent.

The best case scenario here (and I’m dreaming from the perspective of a liberal nutmegger) would be some good old Democratic party backstabbing aimed at ousting Sen. Joe Lieberman. If Dodd runs for Governor, but backs a Blumenthal primary challenge to Lieberman in 2006, the AG may have a shot. Because the State Republican party will likely mount only minimal opposition to the Lieberman seat the winner of that primary will easily cruise to the Senate. The vacant Dodd seat may then be a hotly contested battle between Shays and seven term Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (who would receive some superb political consulting from her husband.)

Whatever happens, Democrats are well poised to make some gains in the State and 2006 will be a fun, fun, fun year in Connecticut politics.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

NOT WORTH THE PAPER IT'S PRINTED ON. I know that it's an end-of-the-year column and is intended to strike a reflective tone, but was this Richard Cohen column really worth publishing? This is the second Washington Post column in as many days dedicated to whining that Washington isn't the clubby cocktail party it used to be, ever since nasty "partisanship" came wafting in with the wind. How many more of these are we meant to endure?

One either takes the current problems of American politics seriously, or one does not. Cohen sighs about Republicans only mingling with Republicans and Democrats with Democrats, and quips that "a little bourbon would do wonders for our dysfunctional government." I know that's meant to be flippant, but really: Bourbon hasn't gone anywhere in D.C., so maybe, just maybe, there are some other developments underlying all this stinky partisanship that's ruining Cohen and David Broder's night life.

And not to be petty, but who edits this stuff? Cohen bookends his column with an anecdote about how George Tenet confronted him at a party over a negative column, but the tension was diffused when they started discussing their mothers. He addresses his readers:

It cannot come as news to you that both Tenet and I have mothers and yet, in some way, maybe it does.

No, Richard, it really doesn't. In no way does that come as news. Good God, man.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SPEAKING OF NON-CRISES. I'm not going to pretend to be sufficiently expert in the arts of forestry to say whether or not the Bush administration's new guidelines for national timber management really are the disaster environmentalists say they are. What I do know is that if the administration really thinks a lack of easy access to felled trees is a significant drag on economic growth, the obvious solution would be to repeal the large tarrif on Canadian lumber that was imposed several years ago.

Liberals tend to have mixed feelings, at best, about trade in general and NAFTA in particular, but none of the usual anti-trade considerations apply here. We're talking about Canada not some low-wage, union-busting, anti-environment third world country. Canadian lumber is at a competitive advantage because, basically, it's a giant sparsely populated country filled with trees. Besides the usual economic arguments against protectionism, there's also a national security component to this. In the wake of 9/11, the United States would very much like stepped-up Canadian cooperation on border control issues, and this trade dispute (along with a couple of other equally ill-motivated trade disputes we've initiated) is a non-trivial stumbling-block to achieving that cooperation.

But if Bush is willing to jeapordize national security and American prosperity in even a small way for the sake of his allies in the domestic tree-cutting industry, it's by no means hard to believe he's willing to wreak environmental havoc for the same reasons.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ARLEN, BARACK, PARIS, AND MORE. Packed with fightin' Dems, restive Republicans, and a whole slew of would-be presidential candidates, 2005 is sure to be an exciting political year. Terence Samuel offers a countdown of the top twenty reasons political junkies should be looking forward to the new year.

--Sam Rosenfeld

STALLING TIME. Kevin Drum observes:

"Staying the course" is the worst possible strategy we can follow in Iraq. We either need to commit enough troops to get the job done or we need to pull out. Since the Bush administration isn't willing to do the former, the only option left is the latter. We should no longer be asking American soldiers to pay the price for Don Rumsfeld's vanity and George Bush's stubbornness.

Mark Kleiman comments:

I'm not sure he's right, though. Is it obvious that staying in Iraq for 10 years has worse consequencs than pulling out? And if the best strategy, all things considered, is to commit enough resources to do the job right, then why shouldn't we be demanding exactly that?

I normally criticize the liberal instinct to try and dodge tough choices on national security issues, but right now I think dodging the question is the precise right thing to do. Several months ago, it would have been nice for the Democrats to vigorously seize one or the other horn of that dilemma, and deciding which horn to seize would have been an important part of that. But at the moment we're less than six weeks away from an Iraqi election that will significantly change the situation. Not in the sense Bush is promising, where the vote somehow solves our problems, but simply in the sense that our problems will be very different depending on how things turn out.

Right now, the best thing to do probably is to "stay the course" until January 30, and start reassessing the situation depending on what happens as the new government takes shape in February. At that point, we ought to decide to either invest more in this venture, or else to invest less and start going home. But December 23, 2004 is a very bad moment at which to try and make that decision.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE ON YOUR OWN SOCIETY. Bush's latest salvo in the creation of an ownership society where everyone is on their own will be keenly felt by college students next year, who will see a reduction in eligibility for financial aid and reduced Pell Grants. From today's New York Times comes this news:

College students in virtually every state will be required to shoulder more of the cost of their education under new federal rules that govern most of the nation's financial aid.

Because of the changes, which take effect next fall and are expected to save the government $300 million in the 2005-6 academic year, at least 1.3 million students will receive smaller Pell Grants, the nation's primary scholarship for those of low income, according to two analyses of the new rules.

In addition, 89,000 students or so who would otherwise be getting some Pell Grant money will get none, the analyses found.

"Season's greetings from Uncle Sam," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, which conducted one of the analyses and represents about 1,800 colleges and universities. "Your student aid stocking is going to be a little thinner next year."

Beyond the implications for Pell Grants, the new rules are expected to have a domino effect across almost every type of financial aid, tightening access to billions of dollars in state and institutional grants and, in turn, increasing the reliance on loans to pay for college. Taken together, many education experts say, the consequences for the nation's core financial aid programs are among the most substantial in a decade.

It's very important if you are trying to create a society where no one expects government help that you first teach the young that they are going to have to do everything on their own and finance their own educations through debt-instruments, such as credit cards and student loans, rather than relying on any sort of collective assistance program, such as federal grants. You might think that reducing aid for young people to go to college would negatively impact the nation's economic future by reducing pathways into the middle-class and the number of skilled workers in the labor force. But it's quite essential to the ongoing Republican effort to re-educate the American public toward a more individualistic philosophy of government that the citizenry be taught early that they can expect no outside assistance and that as soon as they leave the parental nest, they are really and truly on their own.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: IN OTHER NEWS. As we look back on the year that was, it's clear that the Sturm und Drang of the campaign season and such blockbuster news events as Janet Jackson's exposed breast helped to overshadow some important, under-reported stories. Prospect staff writers offer four news stories -- two campaign-related, two pertaining to important international issues -- that never got the coverage or follow-up they deserved.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE DIAMOND-ORSZAG ALTERNATIVE. (Updated, correction below). Those of us who think there's a need for a liberal alternative to the Bush Social Security phase-out plan may want to take a look at the CBO's new analysis (PDF) of the proposal that's been put forward by Brookings' Peter Diamond and Peter Orszag. This is basically an effort to fully-fund projected benefits without any major changes to the structure of the program. Perhaps its most noteworthy feature, however, is that it attempts to do this while simultaneously just writing off the trust fund that Social Security has accumulated since the early 1980s, rather than simply insisting that the general fund repay its obligations rather than keep giving tax cuts to the rich. There are some policy reasons to think that's a good idea (and some reasons to think it's a bad idea) but it's pretty terrible to concede so much to the Greenspan/Bush shell game.

Leaving the purported political necessity of putting an alternative plan on the table, I think looking at this proposal tends to illustrate the general lack of a policy rationale for trying to "fix" Social Security at this point. The Diamond-Orszag plan doesn't differ significantly from the status quo until the mid-2040s because that's how far off this grave problem we're supposed to be fixing is. But as I've been saying, it's not actually within the capacity of the CBO (or the Social Security Administration or anyone else) to accurately project macroeconomic trends forty years in the future. Having a big legislative fight right now about how to respond to a problem that may or may not arise several decades from now is a questionable use of the congress' time. The reasonable thing to do would be to work on the short-term budget deficit first, the medium-term crisis posed by rising health care costs second, and deal with Social Security's hypothetical budget imbalance if and when it actually occurs.

UPDATE: It's been brought to my attention that this gloss of the Diamond-Orszag plan is misleading in several respects. It does not "write off" the trust fund, and does contain important pre-2040 changes including revenues enhancements, higher disability benefits, survivor benefits, low income worker benefits, and expands the system to cover some new classes of employees, as well as the beginnings of other adjustments in benefit levels. Apologies to readers and after the holidays I'll try and write a more complete (and more accurate) account of the plan.

--Matthew Yglesias

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS. Steve Sailer has responded to Garance Franke-Ruta’s blog item about him by promoting on his Web site an “article” about her and The American Prospect that was originally published on the Web by an individual purporting to be named Ana Sofia. Further, Sailer has repeated the charges in this article and sent links to it to the New York Daily News.

Consequently we believe it is necessary to inform the internet community and journalists doing web research on Franke-Ruta and/or Sailer that the article in question was written with malicious and defamatory intent and that any reproduction of the article will constitute a participation in libel for which the reproducer can be held responsible. The information in that article is false.

The article by “Ana Sofia” was based on allegations made by one Louis E.V. Nevaer, who operates the Web site in question. We have good reason to believe that Ms. “Sofia” is, in fact, Nevaer. In addition, Nevaer has a lengthy legal history. He was arrested last month on felony stalking charges stemming from a case being prosecuted by the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. He has been held in police custody since that time on $1 million bail, according to the San Francisco Police Department. The alleged victims in that case, Trenton Norris and Scott Wiener, are two attorneys in San Francisco who previously provided pro-bono legal services to a non-profit organization that represented a former partner of Nevaer’s in a domestic violence case against Nevaer. Nevaer has signaled an intention to plead not guilty; his motion to reduce bail was denied on Dec. 14.

Beyond that, two domestic violence cases were filed against Nevaer in 1998, by different individuals, and since then Nevaer has had five separate civil harassment cases filed against him (two in 2004 and three in 1999) and been sued for libel (in 1998). The Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, has approved multiple restraining orders against Nevaer as part of these cases. (Records of all these cases are available free of charge from The San Francisco Superior Court Electronic Information Center.)

Additionally, Nevaer is currently the subject of a civil stalking and defamation suit, available through PACER, filed in United States District Court, Northern District of California, on behalf of Norris. There is no record at PACER that Nevaer has responded to this complaint despite being served with a summons to respond by the court.

The Prospect has taken the appropriate legal steps against Nevaer to ensure that he not persist in spreading these defamatory and false allegations. Any individual or organization who reproduces his false allegations may face similar action.

-- The editors.

A FESTIVUS MIRACLE. Having aired their grievances loudly, American women appear to have won their holiday-season wrestling match with the Transportation Security Adminstration, which now promises to do a bit less prodding into the bosoms of the womenfolk:

Airport security screeners this week will be instructed not to touch women passengers between their breasts as part of the new pat-down procedures, the Transportation Security Administration said today.

The agency said it is making a modification to its new searching methods that began in September after more than 400 passengers -- mostly women -- formally complained that the experience was invasive, humiliating and even akin to being molested.

This is a real and welcome Christmas present for the millions of travellers flying home for the holidays. Now if only they'd start providing disposable paper slippers at the X-ray counters so that you don't have to tread barefoot on dirty, wet carpets when you send your shoes through, we'd almost be a civilized country again.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. KRAUTHAMMER. Forget “apartheid in reverse” – the war being waged against Christmas in this country is just straight-up apartheid. It’s a pitched battle, and Matthew Yglesias understands the stakes.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BUSH'S DETAIL-FREE PLAN. The Bush administration, which knows a thing or two about how to persuade/bully a reluctant public into going along with radical plans to change America despite the absence of supporting evidence of a need for such changes, is apparently going to continue its push for Social Security reform without getting into the details:

President Bush will spearhead an election-style public relations campaign early next year to try to convince Americans that Social Security is in urgent need of change but will keep dollar and cent details deliberately vague, analysts and officials say.

With Bush's political capital riding on a successful overhaul of the popular retirement program, the White House and its allies plan to bombard the public with presidential speeches, television and radio ads, newspaper op-ed articles and grass-roots rallies between now and early 2005.

"It's going to be a battle royal, very much like an election campaign but over an issue rather than a candidate," said Stephen Moore, executive director of Club for Growth, a Republican group that hopes to spend $15 million on a media campaign backing the White House....

The administration, long known for its secrecy, will likely keep details away from opponents, until a bill emerges possibly as late as April.

"The initial focus of the campaign is that we have to do reform. But they don't want a lot of details out there," said Mike Tanner of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that is preparing to distribute 25,000 Social Security guides to help community leaders shape public opinion for Bush....

By focusing on principles rather than details, analysts said the White House would have an easier time rallying popular support necessary to win a majority of votes in Congress.

"This is about winning, and Bush can't afford to lose."

Given that the Washington Post has already reported that "74 percent think the system faces either major problems or is in crisis," it would seem imperative for the Dems not just to argue against but to try to neutralize that perception by proposing a specific, easy-to-understand plan of their own to "save Social Security." Either way, they're going to have to get out in front of the president on this or they will, I fear, get steamrolled. And they are going to have to get cracking quick.

Expanding on what I wrote earlier, it seems to me the best way to fight back here is the tri-partite strategy of NEUTRALIZE-OPPOSE-PROPOSE. 1) Dems need to neutralize and address the perception that there's a problem by proposing some kind of Social Security fix, even if this bill is basically just cosmetic. The online Post headline this morning, like the USA Today one from last week, shows just how solidly this framework is set, at least with copy-writers: "Social Security Fix Favored." "Fix" is a word we're going to hear a lot more of because Bush will keep repeating it and also because it's really short and fits easily into headlines. 2) They need to aggressively oppose and paint Bush's plan to privatize Social Security in the harshest, most negative light possible. (Where, one might ask, are the 25,000 pamphlets being sent to community leaders in defense of Social Security and attacking privatization?) 3) They need to propose and come out strongly for private retirement accounts outside of the Social Security system so that the debate is not between "doing nothing" and "the Bush plan to fix Social Security" but between the Democratic plan to give you new ways to save for retirement and the Bush plan to dismantle a savings instrument you already have.

Former Clinton adviser and Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel seemed to get this in the Post story this morning. "The best critique is a plan of our own rather than a defense of the status quo, and our plan must reveal the weaknesses in Bush's own plan," he told the Post. Reading his statement it occured to me that this whole debate is a huge opportunity for some energetic young Congressperson to take a very public role opposing the president and boosting his or her national profile, and I don't see why that person shouldn't be Emanuel. Still in his early-to-mid 40s, he's young enough to have credibility talking about this from the perspective of the generation likely to be impacted (good message-messenger unity), he's well-spoken on television, tough as nails, and has a reputation for being aggressive as all get out. Plus he seems to get it, at least from a political perspective.

As for the deep skepticism about Social Security's future among the young, let me suggest one way in which the Democrats can revive their faith. I too am skeptical that Social Security is going to be there 35-40 years from now when I need it, paying out the sums promised me by the Social Security Administration. But it's not because I need to be re-educated and taught the facts about the program. I know the facts. I don't believe Social Security will be there for the simple reason that the Democratic Party has lost political ground in every election save one (1992) since I've been old enough to vote, and has consistently lost on most of the major issues they've fought against the Republicans on in the past four years. I'm skeptical about the future of Social Security because I don't see a political party that's strong enough to defend Social Security against another 40 years of organized Republican assault on the program. I know that, left unmolested, the program would likely be there for me. This isn't a problem of factual understanding, but of political faith.

If the Democrats are going to lose on this one -- and the fact that we're even having this debate here in what's nearly 2005 is a symptom of how just much ground the Dems have already lost on it since 1992 -- I'd rather they lose sooner rather than later so I can know where I stand and how to plan for my future. But if the Democrats can fight and win on this one, they have an opportunity to renew faith in the Social Security system -- and, by extension, in their own party -- simply by successfully defending it from assault. If the Democrats can demonstrate that there is still a powerful constituency for Social Security, they can renew the program politically. If they can turn it into an issue that makes Republicans lose seats in 2006, they can begin to turn the political tide that's been pushing them out to sea. They will be back in the game, and they will prove, to the whole generation that comes after them, that messing with Social Security really is like trying to grab hold of that crackling, electrified third rail.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: JACK THE GIANT. Michael Tomasky honors the late great Jack Newfield, tireless investigative reporter and trailblazing pioneer of advocacy journalism.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT'S HE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? Chuck Hagel's on-again off-again strident criticism of the Bush foreign policy is really nothing new, but the latest episode does contain one interesting development:

"I went through one of these wars," he said.  As a member of the Senate, he said, "I am not going to stand back and allow it to happen again."

That at least sounds like a promise to try and do something instead of just complaining on talk shows from time to time. The Republican congressional majority isn't so overwhelming that Republican critics of the president (or, as they prefer to call him "Donald Rumsfeld") and his policies couldn't join forces with the Democrats and try to force some changes.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TOOTHLESS TIGERS AND "TORT REFORM". Just as the revelations about Vioxx and Celebrex remind us of how toothless the FDA has become, Republicans are pushing for tort reform legislation that will ensure Americans lack the ability to sue drug companies for damages incurred from their harmful products. Robert Reich fills us in on the steady erosion of any and all effective public safeguards under Republican leadership.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BARNES' CATCH-22. According to Fred Barnes, Harry Reid doesn't count as genuinely pro-life even though he opposed legal abortions because his opposition to legal abortions hasn't sufficiently upset other liberals. It's an excellent Catch-22 -- if we all get mad that the Democrats picked a pro-life leader, that shows the party is extreme, fanatical, intolerant, etc. But if we don't get mad, that shows that he isn't "really" pro-life.

--Matthew Yglesias

EVALUATING DNC CHAIRS. Via Josh Marshall, I came across this Wall Street Journal profile of Steve Rosenthal, the political chief of Americans Coming Together. Rosenthal, according to the Journal, has some ideas about the primary calendar:

He suggests Democrats place the five closest states from the previous general election (Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, New Mexico, and Wisconsin) first in the 2008 primary calendar to help tune up for fall battles.

I agree with Josh that this is a pretty smart idea for the Democrats. And I think you could take it even further. Two points. First, a party that was thinking long-term and strategically about how to become a majority party would make a habit of this practice -- of continually shifting the primary calendar every cycle to put whatever states were closest in the last election at the top of the list for the next one. Such a schedule would put a premium on Democrats who fit the "persuader" type, who can win back the voters who in many respects should be voting for their party, but for various reasons did not.

Second, I think a stated willingness to reform the primary calendar, either a la Rosenthal or with some other system of rotation, should be considered a threshold qualification of any aspiring party chairman who wants to earn the "reformer" label. There are lots of things the party chairman doesn't have a lot of influence over and can't really be held accountable for. But this is one of the things he or she does have influence over. And the New Hampshire and Iowa potentates who insist, against all logic and reason, that they should be first on the schedule are no less a part of the party's problem than the Beltway class that gets so much grief.

So who among the candidates supports changes to the primary calendar? E-mail me links if you've got'em, at nconfessore-at-gmail.com.

--Nick Confessore

DEATH PENALTY APOLOGETICS.Yonatan Lupu has a thoughtful piece up on TNR about the utility of the UN’s refusal to second personnel from the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals to help train Iraqi Judges who will preside over the trials of Saddam Hussein and others at the Iraqi Special Tribunal. At the core of the UN’s objections to the court is a principled opposition to the death penalty.

Writes Lupu:

The Times and Human Rights Watch are right that the death penalty spat is partially to blame for the shoddy state of the tribunal. The problem is, they're wrong about who is to blame for the death penalty spat. It's true that Iraqis could have--and probably should have--given in on capital punishment. But at the same time, the United Nations should have recognized that no matter how strongly one feels about the death penalty, there are more important issues. And conducting fair, legitimate trials in Iraq is one of them.

Lupu could not be more correct. To make matters worse, as I’ve mentioned before, European countries have even refused to send teams of forensic archeologists to exhume the mass graves because that would be contributing to a process that results in the death penalty.

On this blog, I’ve made the same argument as Lupu— and received angry letters from readers, who, like I, oppose the death penalty for moral and practical reasons. No doubt Lupu’s inbox will fill up as well, but the point he stresses is important: In the isolated case of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, one’s opposition to the death penalty must be weighed against the potential for good that can result from an Iraqi judiciary well trained in the intricacies of international humanitarian and human rights law.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

POLITICAL CAPITAL. If this Washington Post account is correct, some congressional Democrats are actually taking Bush's soi-disant electoral mandate for ending Social Security as we know it seriously as a consideration in formulating legislative strategy. That's just dumb. Much as the president may like to boast that "This is an issue on which [he] campaigned," it simply wasn't. Anyone whose ears have been functioning for the past twelve months knows perfectly well that the Bush campaign was heavily focused on foreign policy, moral values, and John Kerry's putative flip-flops. Insofar as Bush campaigned on any economic policy issue at all it was the permanent expansion of his tax cuts. Indeed, Bush hasn't even outlined a proposal to support now and he's apparently taken a principled stand against the idea that he ever needs to put specifics on the table. The Social Security campaign hasn't yet begun.

The same story also indicates that such scant public support as exists for the Bush Social Security phase-out is tied to the fact that "A strong majority of respondents, 63 percent, do not think Social Security will have enough money to pay the benefits they are entitled to." According to the Congressional Budget Office's overly pessimistic set of assumptions, this is simply false for anyone over the age of 29. This, to me, drives home the need for liberals to put the alleged "crisis" in perspective. I liked Peter Orzag's flat tire analogy, but it doesn't go far enough. Bush isn't trying to fix a tire by replacing the car, he's trying to fix the tire by destroying the car. It's as if we were to respond to the "insolvency" of the federal general fund by eliminating the government.

--Matthew Yglesias

IS IT OVER? It appears that Democrat Christine Gregoire has achieved a stunning reversal in the hand recount for the Washington state gubernatorial race, and has defeated Republican candidate Dino Rossi by, um, 8 votes.

Chris Bowers argues that, since Gregoire is the one with a lawsuit pending that could only stand to increase her lead, this race really is finally over. He’s been following this closer than I have, but I’m skeptical of any “stick a fork in it” declarations when it comes to Republicans losing close recount fights. They tend to raise a ruckus:

Neither King County nor the state Republican Party could confirm the recount results that led to the Democrats' analysis. GOP officials have said they were likely to take the matter to court in the event of a Gregoire win.

…

About 350 people gathered Tuesday to show support for Rossi in front of the Supreme Court, at a rally sponsored by a conservative talk-radio station.

The crowd chanted "No more fraud!" They held signs saying "Welcome to Ukraine" and wore orange, a tribute to the signature color of demonstrators in Ukraine who protested a fraud-marred election there.

Assuming Rossi eventually does concede, he’s presumably the top Republican contender to take on Maria Cantwell in her 2006 Senate re-election bid.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE ZIONIST-CRUSADER ALLIANCE REALIZED. Remember when we were meant to believe that the abuse at abu Ghraib was confined to a few renegade soldiers who merely humiliated (rather than abused) detainees with impunity during a relatively short period of time? Of course, as we all now know, that turned out to be a big lie, and this Washington Post scoop provides further evidence that detainee abuse at abu Ghraib continued for a long while after Lyddie England’s amateur photo-shoot.

While the Taguba, Schlesinger and Fay reports may have opened our imaginations to the various techniques employed for interrogation and torture, the Post reports on one particularly disturbing innovation.

The documents disclosed by a coalition of groups that had sued the government to obtain them make it clear that both regular and Special Forces soldiers took part in the abuse, and that the misconduct included shocking detainees with electric guns, shackling them without food and water, and wrapping a detainee in an Israeli flag.

Based on what this Israeli Shin-Bet interrogator had to say, I harbor serious doubts that wrapping a prisoner in an Israeli flag helped produce any actionable intelligence. What is less doubtful is how this may have helped to confirm the darkest fears of those whose country we occupy, who see the invasion of Iraq as part of some larger Zionist-Crusader alliance to suppress Muslims around the world.

With anti-Semitic conspiracy theories already running so rampant in the Middle East, and with a population deeply resentful of both the United States and Israel, it is hard to imagine an interrogation technique that could be more counterproductive to American interests in Iraq.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE MOVING GOALPOSTS. The New York Times's Richard Stevenson ably uses the "news analysis" format to cut through some of the cant that's surrounded US Iraq policy from the beginning:

For a year, the administration has suggested that Iraq would move closer to stability as it reached one milestone after another: the capture of Saddam Hussein; the handover of sovereignty and the appointment of an interim government; the deployment of Iraqi security forces; the military campaign to expel the insurgents from strongholds like Falluja; and the first round of elections next month.

Yet most of those milestones have passed with little discernible improvement in the security situation. Now some analysts are concerned that the elections could make the political situation in Iraq even more unstable by producing an outcome in which the Sunni minority feels so marginalized by the Shiite majority that it fuels not just further violence against Americans and Iraqis working with them but also more intense sectarian strife or even civil war.

At this point, I think that the hope for the elections has to be not that they'll drain political support for the insurgency, but that they'll create a government that's at least regarded as more legitimate by Iraq's Shiite majority. Both the CPA and the Allawi-led interim government have had an odd relationship with the Shiite clerical and political leadership which has advocated against resisting the United States but hasn't been very enthusiastic about us either. Relatively few Iraqi Shiites seem motivated to put their lives on the line for the sake of the American occupation, but they might be willing to do so for their religious leaders.

The alternative possibility that no one's really talking about, however, is that the election results themselves could become a bone of contention between different groups inside the US-led political process, with accusations of fraud and intimidation flying back and forth. Something like that could cause our efforts to totally collapse. It's also possible that the post-election government will try and organize a hasty departure for American troops and simply hope that the integration of party-affiliated militias into the government will sufficiently boost the capacity of Iraqi security forces to get along without us. Or, at least, to get along just as poorly without us as they're doing with us. Either way, while this data about American public support for staying the course is interesting, the real issues here have to do with Iraqi politics.

--Matthew Yglesias

TIME FOR HIM TO GO. William Safire's last column was pretty bad, but today's is just pathetic. First he admits he underestimated how long it would take to win in Iraq. Then:

In return for today's grudging concession of tactical misjudgment, however, I claim this expectation: When and if we discover hidden supplies of germ weapons in Iraq or Syria, and as future confessions reveal the extent of connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam, the legion of war critics will forthrightly admit their certitude was misplaced.

Yeah...that's the ticket, it's the war critics whose certitude is misplaced. After all, those WMD will be turning up any day now.

--Matthew Yglesias

TOM DELAY AGAINST THE APPEASERS. Apparently our illustrious House majority leader believes that critics of Donald Rumsfeld are providing aid and comfort to our enemies in a time of war:

What worries me is that we are aiding and abetting the enemy," DeLay told Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was filling in on Sean Hannity's ABC Radio network broadcast.

Without naming names, DeLay pointed the finger at "all these naysayers" who he said "constantly criticize and call everything a mistake."

The repeated attacks on Rumsfeld are only emboldening terrorists and their allies, the Texas conservative said.

[...]

DeLay complained that "most of those who are criticizing [Rumsfeld], starting with the national media, never wanted us in the war to begin with. And then you have a lot of these Democrats who voted against the war. They're the appeasers ..."

This is probably so obvious it's not worth anyone's time to point out, but a 20-second Nexis search will yield plenty of evidence that Tom DeLay knows a thing or two about emboldening an enemy and "call[ing] everything a mistake" in a time of war. As he told Tim Russert in May of 1999, regarding the war in Kosovo:

I am opposed to this policy. I think it's a flawed policy. It was flawed going in. We haven't been told the truth about what's going on. This administration told us it would just be a couple of days of bombing. Milosevic would come to the table. If that didn't happen, it would be a couple of more days. And now they're saying that we've got to be in there to win to save face. Well, they have been proven wrong every day, and even the bombing has not made much difference other than weaken Milosevic's ability to defend his nation. But they have strengthened the resolve of the Serbian people. [italics added]

MR. RUSSERT: Peter King, fellow Republican in Congress, said that you view Kosovo as Impeachment II. You didn't get Bill Clinton the first time, you want to get him now. Barney Frank, the Democrat, said, "In Tom DeLay's eyes, hatred of Clinton is the dominant emotion." Why do you dislike the president so much?

REP. DeLAY: I prayed for the president. I prayed for the president this morning. I don't--it's not that I dislike the president.

MR. RUSSERT: You don't like him.

REP. DeLAY: It's not that I don't dislike him.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you respect him?

REP. DeLAY: I don't respect the president, but I don't agree with the president either. I think this president is one of the most ineffective presidents of my lifetime. His foreign policy is disaster, not just Kosovo but China, North Korea, the Middle East. He has put--he has hollowed out our forces while he's running around having these adventures all over the world.

We're right now 18,000 sailors short, over 700 pilots short. We're supposed to have 1,000 cruise missiles. We have less than 70 and no production line to build more. And yet, he is sending our boys to Kosovo. The majority leader flew to Kosovo on a plane with a Bradley fighting vehicle and was told by some of the crewmen that was going to Kosovo that they had not even fired live rounds. We don't have the wherewithal to even provide ammunition for our soldiers to be trained and practice with before they go into harm's way. This is just a horrible, horrible situation.

I'm utterly certain that one could find examples of more vociferous "naysaying" on DeLay's part if one devoted, say, two minutes to the task. But as I said, why bother? His latest comments are as unsurprising as they are disgusting.

--Sam Rosenfeld

HANDING THE BATON TO THE PROS. One thing to recall about all this intra-blogosphere chatter on Social Security is that none of the chatterers are experienced political strategists or policy makers. Peter Orszag is. Here's his take:

"Social Security is like a car with a flat tire," said Peter Orszag, an economist at the liberal Brookings Institution and adviser in the Clinton White House. "There is a problem. We need to fix the flat tire. But we don't need to replace the car."

This is what effective rhetoric looks like. He's using simple, clear, understandable language and no confusing numbers. He doesn't deny there's a problem, but he puts it into perspective as being relatively minor. The simile makes the Bush plan look like overkill -- you wouldn't junk your car just because it got a flat -- while at the same time framing the problem as something small and fixable and familiar. Everyone's changed a flat tire, after all. Overall, this is a great way of saying there is no permanent crisis, just a routine but minor problem along the road with a program that's otherwise holding up very well.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DON'T INDULGE THEM. I love E.J. Dionne's writing as much as anybody, but I wonder if he lends just a bit too much credibility to the ludicrous "Christmas under siege" hysteria currently being stoked by the usual culture-war suspects by engaging in a reflective philosophical discussion of the issue in his column today. The bloviations of Bill O'Reilly and co. really don't deserve such indulgence. Much more appropriate than Dionne's sober essay is Frank Rich's hard-hitting column on the right-wing mau-mau masters emboldened by the election results and looking for new fights:

In the latest and most bizarre twist on this theme, even Christmas is now said to be a target of the anti-Christian mob. "Are we going to abolish the word Christmas?" asked Newt Gingrich, warning that "it absolutely can happen here." Among those courageously leading the fight to save the holiday from its enemies is Bill O'Reilly, who has taken to calling the Anti-Defamation League "an extremist group" and put the threat this way: "Remember, more than 90 percent of American homes celebrate Christmas. But the small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so vicious, so dishonest -- and has to be dealt with."

...

What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

That's right, but not the whole story. More than simply trumping up an imagined anti-Christmas enemy to marginalize opponents of the Christian right agenda, the "save Christmas" brigade is concocting this threat in order to perpetuate a sense of imminent cultural imperilment among ordinary Americans, the better to stoke the politically beneficial fires of cultural resentment and What's the Matter With Kansas?-style anti-elitism. This isn't exactly rocket science. (It's a curious sight indeed to see some right-wing Jewish commentators manfully playing along in this whole charade, whether it's Michael Medved defending The Passion or Charles Krauthammer condemning of the dastardly assault on Christmas.)

With the Christian right seizing the post-election moment on all fronts, with the Senate majority leader refusing to acknowledge that AIDS cannot be transmitted through sweat out of fealty to the conservative Christian movement, with a broken and battered Arlen Specter soon to be flanked on the Judiciary Committee by two cultural right radicals, I rather wish a thoughtful Christian liberal like Dionne would refrain from lending this faux controversy legitimacy it doesn't deserve. These guys are doing just fine at the moment and aren't in need of any assistance.

UPDATE: Just scroll down and take a look at these headlines to see what I mean about the hysteria being concocted around this issue. Do mainstream Americans have some legitimate grievances with cultural elites in this country? Yes. Do Democrats need to do a better job of recognizing and grappling with those grievances -- even the illegitimate ones? Yes. Is Christmas really under assault in America? No. That's not even a question worth taking seriously. (Thanks to J.R..)

--Sam Rosenfeld

BADR CORPS: THEN AND NOW. My fellow liberal magazine Iraq-bloggers Spencer Ackerman and Brad Plumer have both noted Abdul Aziz Hakim's trial balloon to have the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) deploy "100,000 militia fighters to protect polling stations" during the January vote, which is expected to be won by the list Hakim heads. Brad and Spencer both note that an election that kicks off with a mass mobilization by a Shiite fundamentalist militia is unlikely to win hearts and minds among the Sunni Arab public.

I'm more excited about the opportunity for this week's round (see earlier episodes) of "remember when." This time our guest will be the U.S. Department of State and their classic press release "Rumsfeld Warns Syria, Iranian Badr Corps Not to Interfere in Iraq":

Asked more about the Badr Corps, Rumsfeld said there are reports of numbers in the hundreds operating in Iraq and more on the other side of the border. He described the corps as "the military wing of the Supreme Council on Islamic Revolution in Iraq" and said it is "trained, equipped and directed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard." . . .

Rumsfeld said the coalition would hold the Iranian government responsible for the corps' actions, and armed Badr corps members found in Iraq "will have to be treated as combatants."

Whether or not the Badr Corps spends Election Day providing security and incidental pro-SCIRI intimidation, or just unofficial incidental pro-SCIRI intimidation, this particular Iranian "trained, equipped, and directed" militia is almost certain to be a key security institution in post-election Iraq, since SCIRI will be very influential in the new government and Rumsfeld has failed to bequeath Iraq anything like the requisite number of competent and loyal troops. Incidentally, one doesn't hear much any more about the military effectiveness of Ahmed Chalabi's Free Iraqi Forces, despite Rumsfeld's best efforts to put them in charge.

--Matthew Yglesias

REGARDING HENRY. Francis X. Clines has a nice “Editorial Observer” piece in The New York Times in which he suggests that Senate Democrats setting up their new investigative operation should take a look at the work of Rep. Henry Waxman’s office to learn how effective minority muckraking is done. This is a very good suggestion. Waxman is an incredible asset to the party, and has been for years. The reports his office puts out have often had a real impact -- they're not just drops in the well. Byron Dorgan and his staff should take some notes.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SENSE ON IRAN. Having authored a brief hit piece on the group, it would be churlish not to note that the Committee on the Present Danger has released a sensible report (via my friend Rachel Friedman at The Corner, who does not approve) on nudging Iran toward regime change through constructive engagement with the Iranian people. This is the kind of approach that has more in common with the patient, successful approaches we've taken to Serbia and Ukraine than to the Iraq War and some of the MEK-related schemes I've heard tossed around.

The fly in the ointment here, as far as I'm concerned, is that the payoff of this sort of thing is unpredictable; while it might work quickly, it also might work very slowly or not at all. Thus, even a good regime-change policy is no substitute for a real anti-proliferation policy, which still needs to be focused on expanding America's willingness to engage Tehran and Europe's willingness to wield economic sticks. Even an imperfect Iranian disarmament-and-inspections deal would buy a considerable amount of time during which we could hope other policy initiatives would bear fruit.

--Matthew Yglesias

POLLING SOCIAL SECURITY. Looking through the latest Washington Post poll, I'm starting to think that the political challenge of taking on Bush's Social Security elimination "plan" may not be quite the uphill battle some of us have been assuming. The public disapproves of Bush's handling of Social Security by a 38-53 margin, which comes in the context of generally widespread skepticism about George W. Bush's domestic policies (37-56 on health care, 46-51 on the economy) and a basically even division about the man himself.

Indeed, disapproval of Bush on the Social Security front extends to every age group. My fear had been that the GOP had a secret reservoir of support on this issue because generally anti-Bush under-30s have historically had a soft spot for ending Social Security. But the issue bleeding seems to have operated in the other direction, with the youngest cohort disliking Bush by the same 38-52 margin as the 65-and-overs. The closest thing to a supportive age cohort is the 31- to 44-year-old group, which disapproves of Bush by a "mere" 39-49. Fortunately, this is the demographic class where the self-interested argument against privatization is at its most obvious. These folks have paid into Social Security all their lives and now Bush wants to cut their benefits to pay for tax cuts to the rich.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOUSEKEEPING NOTE. Since Brad DeLong took me to task as a "he" and since my editors apparently get a fair number of letters in which readers have made the same not unwarranted presumption -- that a person with an uncommon name writing about politics is very likely male -- I felt I should clarify this point: I am not a man (except in the most general, 18th-century, rights-of-man sense). The first name comes from the movie Les Enfants du Paradis and is and has always been a woman's name. Frank Ruta is a man's name, but it is not mine.

The question is often raised why there are so few women bloggers. That's a topic for a longer post some other time, but Brad's post makes me wonder if there hasn't also been some kind of Peter Steiner lack of transparency issue at work here underlying the question.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE POLITICAL PROBLEM WITH FACTS. And following up on these posts, while I commend Matt on putting together a great group of statistics that proves his point about how the Social Security crisis is trumped up -- facts with which, I may add, I have no argument -- I still think it will be exceptionally difficult as a matter of rhetoric and politics to condense these numbers and facts into the kind of explanation your average, kind of out-of-it American voter who pays attention to politics with only one ear and only episodically will instinctively get. George W. Bush's rhetoric about "fixing Social Security" is easy to understand and is in line with a decade's worth of bipartisan framing and rhetoric on this topic. It doesn't even sound very different from Bill Clinton's promise to "save Social Security." That's about as much as a lot of people are going to hear. And there's certainly no counter-message out there yet, what the Congress in recess, the holidays, and the interest groups still gearing up. So this is a good time for some back and forth.

If liberals learned anything from 2004 -- and so many have written and spoken eloquently on this topic -- it is that they have an instinctive overconfidence in the capacity of clear facts, simply presented, to change people's minds and consistently underestimate the power of easy-to-understand rhetoric that doesn't involve a lot of facts and numbers. All I'm saying is that if Democrats have learned anything, this is their chance to show it and come up with a simple, credible message of their own that takes the lessons of 2004 to heart.

Josh Marshall's rhetorical contribution, that this is an effort to "phase out Social Security," strikes me as being on the right track. I happen to be partial to the "if it's confusing, it must be bad" argument, which honors the average, kind of out-of-it voter's inability to wrap their mind around actuarial tables and the distinctions between trust funds and general funds and how rates of productivity growth and GDP impact the program. Mike Tomasky's suggestion that this be addressed in simple, easy-to-understand television ads is also good, as is all of this back and forth.

I want to emphasize that last point again, because some of the least successful arguments during the general election also managed to become incredible popular on liberal Web sites, and I sincerely hope that people in the liberal blogosphere don't get caught up in similar rhetorical eddies during this debate. There is a very real danger of people in online communities arriving at an enthusiastic consensus about a position that they find pleasing but that doesn't actually help them accomplish anything. It'll be important to avoid that sort of satisfying yet ineffective message on Social Security privatization.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHY THE CRISIS MATTERS. Readers should check out Brad Delong's response to Garance's reasonable concerns about whether, after years of bipartisan consensus that we need to act to solve the Social Security crisis, it's really viable to start arguing that there's no crisis. But that was a policy response, and Garance was largely raising a political question. Prospect editor Michael Tomasky today argues that for political purposes all these fancy charts will do no good -- it's all about self-interest, which suggests an argument centered around Bush's looming benefit cuts.

Looking for a higher synthesis here, the way I see it is that making the crisis case is the necessary foreground for making the benefit-cuts case. I was talking to some libertarians last night who expressed incredulity that I actually believed I will be drawing full benefits under an un-reformed system when I reach full-eligibility age in 2048 even though the Congressional Budget Office's overly pessimistic projections indicate that I'll be able to do just that. As long as people think the system will "go bankrupt" sometime in the reasonably near future, then arguments about benefit cuts won't get you anywhere -- reduced benefits plus a chance to earn some money in the stock market sounds a lot better than no benefits whatsoever.

This isn't an either/or choice -- liberals need to simultaneously appeal to individual self-interest (Bush's favored tactic of finding examples of "ordinary people" to illustrate his point would work nicely here) with efforts to reframe the conversation from "how do we solve to crisis?" to "should we abolish a healthy and successful program and replace it with something less generous?"

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THERE IS NO SOCIAL SECURITY CRISIS. Matthew Yglesias is going to say this very slowly: There. Is. No. Social. Security. Crisis. Unless the rest of Matt's age cohort understands that, Social Security is doomed.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: HARRY AND LOUISE REDUX. So there's no Social Security crisis. What makes you think that fact will get in the way of George W. Bush's quest to abolish Social Security? Michael Tomasky explains why the truth of the matter isn't enough, and how the battle will have to be fought: with a couple at a kitchen table.

--Jeffrey Dubner

REAL SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM. While everyone's talking about Social Security reform, it might be a good moment for the Democrats to reach out to a constituency they'd like to make headway with, whose votes have been critical in the past, and with whom they are on increasingly shaky ground: mothers. Social Security as it currently exists doesn't do much for stay-at-home moms. The Older Women's League has been talking about this for years. But it really hits home when you talk to someone in her mid-60s, as I did recently, who's looking at a monthly Social Security check of $300 per month because she spent her prime working years raising kids. No one can live on that.

Stay-at home moms who devote their working lives to child-rearing get screwed under the current system. How is adding more complications to the system in the form of private accounts going to help them? That strikes me as a question worth asking -- and not least because this group is becoming part of the GOP base.

Further, given that the majority of Social Security beneficiaries are women -- "60 percent of beneficiaries over 65 and 72 percent of recipients over 85," according to OWL -- this whole upcoming reform discussion should have some kind of gendered component. According to OWL:

Today in America, the average woman age 65 and over lives six years longer than the average man. As a result, she is typically widowed and living alone. She struggles to make ends meet on an annual income of $15,615 (compared with over $29,171 for men). During her lifetime she probably spent 17 years caring for children and 18 years caring for elderly parents. Her retirement income is also smaller because she probably did not receive a pension, and was paid less than the average man. As a result, she receives lower Social Security benefits. She spends a higher proportion of her income on housing costs — leaving less for vital necessities such as utilities, medical costs, food, and transportation.

Looked at in the context of these facts, this whole discussion about Social Security privatization is one about the future of American women and who's going to take care of us when we get old. Talking about providing young people with personal accounts is a very different thing than talking about asking 85-year-old women to figure out their finances and not get fleeced by some smooth-talking scam artist on the phone. At least with Social Security, no one can scam you out of it when you're old and disoriented.

Add to this the fact that, despite all the progress women have made in the past 50 years, women still are not as likely to know how to seize control of the reins of their own finances, and you have a prescription for all sorts of unpleasant complications for America's women, and for the doddery, doting grandmothers of the future.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

NOW ONLINE! The January print issue of The American Prospect is now available online! We've got Michael Lind, John B. Judis, Ruy Teixeira, and David J. Sirota on the electoral map of 2004 (and 2006 and 2008); Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr on Social Security privatization; Susan Jacoby on the threat of a new kind of Supreme Court conservative; and much more -- including an extensive package on electoral reform, both how far we've come and how much is left to fix. Take a look.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WILL'S CHEAP SHOT. So George Will identifies "Kuttnerism" as the sin of condescension? Robert Kuttner, as you'd imagine, doesn't quite agree. And which is the greater form of condescension -- recognizing bigotry or pooh-poohing it?

--Jeffrey Dubner

DOES BUSH BELIEVE IN THE CRISIS? Following up on the post below and a suggestion from Nick Confessore, I thought it would be instructive to compare the Social Security Administration's economic forecasts on which the alleged "crisis" is based to the administration's own growth forecasts. The SSA says that "the average annual growth in real GDP is projected to be 2.9 percent over the short-range projection period (2004-13), a slower rate than the 3.3 percent average observed over the historical 40-year period (1962-2002)." Meanwhile the White House's Council of Economic Advisors has recently released its own economic forecasts (PDF) for the years 2004-10, concluding that we'll see an average of 3.4 percent growth for that seven-year period.

For the numbers to work out, we'd need to see an extraordinary collapse to 1.87 percent average annual GDP growth for 2011-13. Another way of putting this would be that for five out of the seven years in which their projections overlap, the administration's estimates for productivity growth are higher than those used in the SSA's intermediate forecast. If even the White House doesn't believe the SSA's short-term forecasts (i.e., the ones that are most likely to be accurate) why should the rest of us (and the press and politicians in general) be expected to take their 75-year (and even infinite horizon!) forecasts seriously?

--Matthew Yglesias

SOCIAL SECURITY'S RHETORICAL CRISIS. Though I'd hardly consider myself an "older liberal," I have to disagree with my esteemed younger colleagues Matt Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld about the utility of arguing that there is no Social Security crisis. I seriously doubt that asserting that there is no Social Security crisis will work as a Democratic strategy at this late date, even though it's largely true. It simply won't sound credible. Not after Paul Tsongas founded the Concord Coalition in 1992 with Warren Rudman and ran for office on a platform of fiscal responsibility and saving Social Security from collapse -- a platform widely hailed as being too courageous and truthful to win. Not after the young Democrats at Lead -- or Leave declared that "America's Social Security system is in trouble. It has become an unfair, unsound program... ." Not after the 2030 Center's Hans Riemer won plaudits for launching a Gen-X think tank to, according to a 1999 NPR report, "save Social Security before America's 75 million baby boomers begin retiring." Not after his right-leaning generational compatriots at Third Millenium launched their Campaign to Reform Social Security project. Not after Ross Perot. Not after Bob Kerrey and Warren Rudman wrote in The Washington Post just two years ago that:

the clear danger is that without a free lunch to promise, politicians will fall back on an equally bad option: the Do Nothing Plan. Voters shouldn't let that happen. ...

Doing nothing means deep benefit cuts or steep payroll tax increases for future generations, which is why the Social Security trustees warn that prompt action is essential. ...

Not acting is itself a choice -- one that has grim consequences for today's midlife adults and even bigger ones for their children. Politicians of both parties should get behind specific reform plans or be held accountable for supporting the consequences of the Do Nothing Plan.

The need for Social Security reform is not a Republican rhetorical set-up the Democrats now need to counter-frame. It has been the dominant bipartisan national narrative for more than a decade and I don't think that's the kind of thing that gets successfully reframed during a four- to six-month legislative battle with a powerful president whose party controls both houses of Congress. Just look at the USA Today headline on Thursday: "Bush: It's Time to Fix Social Security." The narrative frame here is already set.

Saying there is no problem with Social Security just allows the Republicans to once again paint the Democrats as the behind-the-times defenders of the status-quo while the Republicans go ahead and take action to fix something that people have been arguing about fixing for decades. Denial will allow the Republicans, once again, to claim the mantle of being the party of political reform. "But he's lying!" may be a common Democratic complaint about the president, but it's not a rhetorical or political strategy. Nor, as we saw on Nov. 2, is it a particularly effective charge.

The Democrats' best option here, it seems to me, begins with what Kerrey and Rudman laid out. The Dems need to come up with an alternative to Bush's plan that can be framed as change and as solving the Social Security problems that they too have been yammering about for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, the seeds of the best counter-argument to Bush's plan that I've heard thus far were scattered about Sebastian Mallaby's Washington Post column this morning, "Trouble with Choices." He argues against Social Security reform on the grounds that people are already overwhelmed by choices and don't actually want that all that many more. I think this is exactly right. Most young people I know don't even understand how Social Security works to begin with, and these folks are about as educated and politically engaged a subset as you're likely to find. All this talk about reform is even more confusing. Matt's strategy posits the existence of an informed, engaged citizenry capable of quickly understanding and eager to learn the actual details of Social Security accounting and budgeting. I think most young people just find this whole topic confusing and boring and guilt-inducing (i.e., you know you should take the time to really understand it but you don't want to), and wish it would just go away. There was no public groundswell for Social Security privatization in 2004, just as there was no public groundswell for deposing Saddam Hussein before Bush brought the issue up, so this is basically another one of those hugely important but complex issues being foisted on a reluctant public by the national GOP leadership. Which means there is no on-the-ground, native interest in this topic sweeping across the nation.

These attitudes, rather than being an obstacle, though, are a huge opportunity for the Democrats. All they need to do is what the GOP did on the Clinton heathcare plan -- which is make the GOP plan permanently associated in the public mind with every one of the negative thoughts people already have about this topic: that it's complicated, it's confusing, it's boring, it's intimidating, it's anxiety-provoking -- and if Bush gets his way, you're going to have to deal with it every year for the rest of your life.

Mallaby is basically arguing (though what follows are my words) that Bush's Social Security plan will replace something that's simple and works well with a system that's as complicated and confusing as doing your own taxes. And who wants to deal with that for the rest of their life? Besides, Mallaby argues, America already has the best public-private retirement system in the world. Social Security is the public part, and if you want private accounts, well, that's what 401(k)s and IRAs are for. Bush's plan will be one more thing to worry about in a world where everyone's got enough on their minds already. Instead of our current public-private system where you're already free to earn and save as much as you want, on top of the existing low-level public baseline, Bush wants a pure-risk, all-private system where there's no baseline at all. He wants to trade simplicity and security for paperwork. Now that strikes me as a argument people will understand.

Besides, if anyone really wanted to fix the private retirement account planning system (and if we're going to enter the private account arena, let's really enter it, I say), they could start by making it mandatory for employers to offer employees the opportunity to buy into 401(k)s before they've worked somewhere for more than one year, and make it easier for people to stick with one account even when they switch jobs. These are retirement planning issues I'm pretty sure young people would get behind. Today's young people live life in the churn, switching jobs every few years, but this widespread ineligibility to participate in company 401(k)s (even without an employer contribution!) before a year of employment can really eat into their ability to plan for the future. For example, if you switch jobs three times in your 20s -- a not uncommon experience -- you can lose 30 percent of your retirement-planning capacity during that decade.

All this would give the Dems a tripartite plan: 1) unite behind a legislative proposal that will show that the Dems are serious about fixing the Social Security crisis; 2) make the Bush plan look as complicated and hated as taxes; and 3) propose novel and desirable and appealing changes to the private retirement account system, and explain why they are vastly superior to Bush's plan for confusing, paperwork-heavy, private accounts.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: AIN'T NO EASY CODE. For every top-secret decoder ring that promises to show the Democrats how to win 100 Senate seats and 538 electoral votes by 2008, there's a debunker ring waiting in the next box of cereal. Our current print issue (now available online!) contains David Sirota's instructions for pulling off red-state conquests -- but after you've read that, take a look at Democratic Leadership Council Policy Director Ed Kilgore's counter-argument asking whether "economic populism" is the answer to all problems.

--Jeffrey Dubner

NO CRISIS. Here's a nice quick response from Nancy Pelosi to the president's comments on Social Security at his press conference today:

"Today, President Bush disingenuously stated that as the first step toward Social Security reform, 'we're going to have to explain to Members of Congress that crisis is here.' Mr. President, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has determined that Social Security is secure for nearly 50 years, without any changes whatsoever. A better first step would be for the President to stop pretending otherwise.

This is good. Framing the question around these 50-year projections is rather silly anyway, but assuming that people continue to discuss the issue in these terms, the next step in debunking the "crisis" language is to stress that even in 50 years when the trust fund is projected to be depleted, the program doesn't somehow all of a sudden stop. Social Security won't "go bankrupt". In fact, at that moment of true, disastrous reckoning around 2042 or 2052 -- the dreaded moment when the trust fund finally disappears, unless of course it doesn't -- the program will pay out benefits that, in real terms, exceed what retirees are receiving now.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE CRYSTAL BALL. For the wonkishly inclined, check out this paper (PDF) from Northwestern's Robert Gordon looking at the Social Security Administration's economic forecasting, which Gordon concludes i's far too pessimistic. Gordon estimates that we'll see GDP growth of around 3.28 percent per year for the next twenty years instead of the SSA's projection of 2.4 percent average annual growth. Unlike the SSA, Gordon doesn't pretend to be able to foresee events in the year 2066, but the clear implication of his work is that the SSA is being systematically too pessimistic.

I don't know if it's in any way possible to accomplish this, but it would be extremely useful if people could get the press to stop treating the SSA long-term economic forecast as if it were the word of an infallible God. It isn't. They change their projections regularly, and have consistently become more optimistic about Social Security's future with each passing year. For dull and technical reasons explained here, it's extremely likely that if we don't change the system at all for a few years and the SSA holds their methodology constant, the forecast is going to be revised in a way that makes the whole alleged problem vanish.

--Matthew Yglesias

RUNAWAY TRAIN. Coverage of yesterday's horrific carnage in Iraq centers around the theme that the insurgency is trying to "derail" Iraq's January elections. That, however, is just an abstraction and a cliché that's served to prevent real analytical thinking about the vote and potential problems with it. The elections certainly won't be "derailed" in the sense of "not held" -- the insurgents simply can't do anything about that no matter how many people they kill. They certainly can depress turnout, especially in the Sunni Arab parts of the country, and they can even kill people on Election Day, but none of that will prevent the election from happening.

On the flipside, insofar as the hope was that the election will derail the insurgency by building Sunni Arab support for the new regime in Iraq, that hope's already been largely dashed. Sunni and Shiite leaders are at odds and have been for some time. The likelihood is that the election will further empower elements of the Shiite communitiy that the Sunni Arabs most fear.

The biggest genuinely open question in my mind concerns the prospects for fraud. Having raised warning signs about this for weeks before Afghanistan's presidential election only to see things go smoothly, Bush's critics seem shy about making the point this time around. It's important to see that these are very different circumstances. There was fraud in Afghanistan -- a lot of it -- but it didn't undermine the legitimacy of Hamid Karzai's election because he was clearly the most popular figure in the race, so the fraud didn't make a difference. Iraq, by contrast, is holding a parliamentary election featuring proportional representation, and it's unlikely that any list will secure an outright majority. That means the ultimate result is much more sensitive to fraud. What's more, the incumbent leader, Iyad Allawi, is expected to lose power to the United Iraqi List, which creates incentives for fraud and could lay the groundwork for a post-election dispute.

Election monitoring, meanwhile, will be scant-to-nonexistent. Beyond outright fraud, you've got party-affiliated militias operating in many cities that will potentially use force or the threat of force to influence the outcome. If all the major contenders accept the results as legitimate then, irrespective of whatever problems may arise, things will likely be okay (by Iraqi standards) and the new government will keep on fighting the insurgents. But if the UIL decides it's been cheated out of its fair share of power, or Allawi decides he's being forced out by an Iranian-orchestrated conspiracy, then things could rapidly deteriorate.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE LAME DUCK'S LAMENT. I've just been reading The Washington Post's writeup of the new, more quarrelsome Republican Congress that Sam linked to earlier, and it struck me that the authors are missing what's probably the key factor here: George W. Bush's lame-duck status. Uncertainty about who the party's leader will be in a few years undermines the power of the current leader, both because he won't be around to reward loyalty and punish defection, and also because it creates incentives for various Republicans to start jockeying to be Bush's successor or line up behind their favorite candidate.

Since Harry Truman, second-term presidents have all tried to eliminate this problem by handing off the nomination to their vice president, and they've invariably succeeded. Dick Cheney, however, has at least implicitly been taking himself out of the running for the 2008 nomination ever since he was first selected. Indeed, this was widely cited as a factor that, in Bush's mind, worked in Cheney's favor. Many of us assumed the plan was to nominate Jeb Bush and keep the dynasty going, but he's bowed out of the sweepstakes. Either man might reconsider and, frankly, I'd be a bit surprised if one doesn't. One way or another, I think Bush is going to discover that if he wants to keep his coalition together, he needs to dedicate a successor in a way that will knock other establishment Republicans out of the race and marginalize the rest as deviationists. Otherwise, it's hard to see how the party can remain united around a legislative agenda but divided about who its leader should be.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEATH AND PREGNANCY. In the predictably gruesome media melee over Scott Peterson's sentencing early last week, I kept feeling vaguely angry that there was such an incredible amount of attention being paid to the Peterson trial. This is to take nothing away from the tragedy of Laci Peterson's death, but the focus seemed to be at the exclusion of any larger conversation on domestic violence or violence against pregnant women. (Notwithstanding my aversion to the so-called "Laci and Connor's Law," i.e., the Unborn Victim of Violence Act, which was not an ode to those murdered, as it pretended to be, but rather a shameless ploy from the Christian conservatives to give rights to the "unborn.") Now the Washington Post has started a brilliant and important, if terribly depressing, series on violence against pregnant women -- homicide being the leading cause of death in pregnant women in several states. You can find today's story, the second in the series, here.

--Sarah Wildman

BUSH, STRETCHING OUT AND GETTING COMFORTABLE. Ah, it’s going to be a great four years. George W. Bush just wrapped up a rare, hour-long, real-deal press conference, without the usual backup from a visiting world leader that he usually relies on when facing the media. Bush’s answers were alternately petulant and philosophical, all delivered in that dependably incoherent manner the American people have come to know, love, and reward with reelection. We’ll have to wait for the official transcript for verbatim quotes, but here are some highlights from my notes:

• Philosophical Bush. The president fielded the first of two questions on Donald Rumsfeld with this rumination, delivered very slooooooowly with lots of emphatic hand gestures: “The Secretary of Defense is a complex job. It’s a complex job in times of peace; and it’s a complex job in times of war.” He answered a question regarding the Bernard Kerik nomination in similar, pedantic man-child fashion: “We’ve vetted a lot of people in this administration. We’ve vetted a lot of people in the first term; and we’ve vetted a lot of people in the second term ... The lesson is to keep on vetting.”
• Sensitive Bush. He answered the second question regarding Rumsfeld this way: “I know Secretary Rumsfeld’s heart. He’s a good, decent man. He’s a caring fellow ... a good human being.” As for the first man whose heart Bush famously assured the world he understood, Vladimir Putin came up early in the press conference. Bush answered a question about the U.S. position on Putin’s recent power grabs in Russia with a rather remarkably tepid acknowledgment of “a difference of opinion” on the matter between the two countries. The important thing to know, Bush reiterated, was that he and Putin had a “good personal relationship,” which is a crucial, crucial thing, given that disagreements can be aired among people with such “close” relationships in a civil and mutually respectful manner. (In other words, his answer wasn’t exactly “freedom is on the march”.)
• Principled Bush. The president got a tad petulant when fielding questions on Social Security. His emphatic response to any and all queries about his position on the subject was an indignant, righteous refusal to answer: “You’re not going to get me to negotiate with myself,” he repeatedly told the perplexed reporters. “I know what you’re trying to get me to do. You’re trying to get me to answer ‘Why this,’ ‘why that,’ to take positions -- don’t bother to ask me.” Rather than merely dodge the questions, Bush seemed intent on staking out an explicit, principled position in favor of dodging the question. There may have been a method to this madness above and beyond Bush’s stated explanation that “Congress writes legislation” and therefore he, as the president, shouldn’t be setting specific guidelines for a Social Security reform proposal. The president isn’t usually a big separation-of-powers, checks-and-balances kind of guy.
• Inexplicable Bush. He fielded a question about the recent revelations of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay with some standard-issue boilerplate, then ended his answer with a bizarre assurance: “We’re gonna continue to push this issue hard.” Push what? Prisoner abuse?
• Hubristic Bush. The president, strangely, seemed perhaps at his most passionate and animated when describing his guest-worker proposal and his intention to push for it in Congress, apparently not quite grasping the fact that immigration may turn out to occupy the central axis of intra-GOP conflict this term between Congress and the White House.

UPDATE: Here's the transcript.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SO CLOSE, AND YET SO FAR. There's a curious perversity, or paradox, in how the relatively narrow balance of power in Congress winds up backing the Democrats into precisely the kind of organized timidity the party's grassroots finds so wanting. To put it more succinctly: The congressional Democrats are ineffective in part because the majority seems so tantalizingly within reach. And the very closeness of the balance of power induces the leadership to pursue tactical advances at the expense of strategic ones.

Recall that in the election cycles after 1994, when they lost about 50 House seats -- and the majority -- Democrats started to gain back seats with some regularity. During the first two years of George W. Bush's first term they were only nine seats down, or five wins away from being back in the majority (congressional margins being zero-sum). For senior House Democrats who were around in the days of the Democratic ascendancy, and never really expected to be out in the wilderness for this long, the narrowness of that margin must have had an intoxicating effect. If you squinted a little, if you let yourself be swayed by those poll numbers showing that a majority of Americans in principle agree with Democratic stands on major issues, it was easy to fool yourself into thinking the party was (and is) about to turn the corner.

Why is this important? If you believe the game is pretty close, it follows that you can win elections with a little tweak to the message, a slight alteration of the policy, marginally more fundraising, and a bigger rapid-response team. There's no incentive to throw the long ball, to innovate, to try something completely different. You play it safe. If you're a Democratic leader, and you think you're only a handful of seats away from being back in control, you become afraid to do anything that might bleed five or six seats of what you have now. Perversely you're more fearful -- more paralyzed, more risk-averse -- than if you were, say, 50 or 60 seats down.

The same dynamic occurs, more or less, during the legislative process. Democratic leaders continue to act like the junior partner in some national unity government, where the main purpose of keeping the caucus together seems to be pushing slight changes to awful Republican legislation rather than mounting wedges and laying traps that will help define the political debate down the road and vault the party back into the majority.

Under different political circumstances, this kind of caution might make sense. The problem is that the Republican majority is, in fact, fairly stable, and is likely to remain so for some years. The Democrats will not return to power on the Hill until there is a major change in the underlying political dynamic in this country, a fact which the relative smallness of the GOP majority (by historical standards) tends to obscure. And the only way to effect a major change in the underlying political dynamics is to bet the table -- to really change the order of business. In part, this will likely have to involve a genuine reform agenda, one which requires Democrats to take risks and exercise some self-discipline. (For instance, denying themselves absurd pork-barrel projects, even if hurts some members, the better to make the deficit an albatross around the free-spending GOP Congress' neck.) But winning will also require of the Democratic minority a willingness to suffer tactical defeats in the service of strategic victory. A good example here is, as Josh Marshall has been pointing out, a willingness to sacrifice Democratic members who waver on Social Security abolition, even to work for their defeat if they defect in the coming months and years. Why? Because "[m]aking the elimination of Social Security a strictly Republican gambit raises the political stakes dramatically. Many Republicans will be far more cautious without bipartisan cover. Democrats must deny them even the thinnest of fig leaves. Making it a strictly Republican affair will also provide valuable clarity in the coming election, rather than the muddled picture created by Democratic defections on the 2001 tax bill." Indeed, in the long run it's probably better for the Democrats to lose a few members in 2006 than to allow the GOP that fig leaf. It's a lesson Newt Gingrich understood well and used to his advantage. Indeed, the conservative movement essentially sacrificed a president -- George H.W. Bush -- to enshrine opposition to taxation as a bedrock principal of Republican belief. (If there are any political history buffs out there, I'd be curious to know if conservative anti-tax groups succeeded in knocking off any Republican members who voted for Bush's 1990 tax increase.) I suspect that when the Republicans were in the minority, and especially in 1993, when they were really in the minority -- Bill Clinton in the White House, 82 seats down in the House, 14 down in the Senate -- the very height of the climb back proved liberating.

Let me stress that this is not, or does not have to be, an ideological argument. The problem I'm describing is often pitched as one rooted in attempts at Clintonian "triangulation," but that misses the point. There will be times when it's better to let a member defect rather than lose him or her on Election Day. But there will also be times when allowing defections sets the party back strategically in ways that make it hard to mount an effective fight for power. Good leadership for the Democrats will perforce consist of knowing which is which.

UPDATE: Mark Schmitt has some more thoughts here, along with some well-put caveats about the uses and misuses of party discipline.

--Nick Confessore

MERE IOUS. Reason's Jacob Sollum makes an argument that's key to propping up the notion that there's a Social Security crisis:

[B]y accepting as a fact to be "noted" the claim that "Social Security can pay full benefits for at least 38 years," the story overlooks the crucial point that Social Security benefits are expected to start exceeding payroll taxes 24 years sooner than that. Taxpayers will have to make up the difference one way or another, since there's nothing but government IOUs in the "trust fund."

In non-Social Security contexts we call those IOUs "bonds" and they're considered a perfectly reputable asset. Saying the trust fund's bonds are "nothing but government IOUs" is like saying the cash in my wallet is "nothing put green pieces of paper," my credit card is "nothing but plastic," my bank account is "nothing but a computer file somewhere," or a contract is "nothing but a bunch of ink."

It's true, as Sollum says, that since these bonds are issued by the government "taxpayers" will need to foot the bill to redeem them, but there's a crucial distributive angle here. The trust fund, as set up by Ronald Reagan to ensure Social Security's viability, was created with excess payroll tax revenue, derived primarily from working- and middle-class Americans. The general fund to which the money was lent and which bears the obligation of repaying the debt is financed mainly through income taxes, which fall primarily on the wealthy. The reason the general fund is currently projected to be unable to make good on these payments is that the president has drastically scaled back taxes on the wealthy. Now he'd like to pay for those tax cuts by having the general fund default on its debt to the trust fund. It's not a question of whether "taxpayers" will pay, but a question of which taxpayers will pay.

One also wonders about the impact on the financial markets of the president of the United States and the leaders in Congress adopting the slogan that our bonds are "IOUs" that don't really need to be repayed. Right now the president is financing, among other things, two ongoing wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) by borrowing money. The only reason he's able to do that is that bond purchasers are confident that their money will be repaid with interest. In some sense, of course, we don't really need to repay any of that money; no one is going to arrest the U.S. government for non-payment of debt. But any hint that we were contemplating that course of action would -- rightly -- set off a financial panic.

--Matthew Yglesias

ADMITTING YOU DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM. I got an email today from a reader containing the talking points the Democratic leadership is developing on Social Security. Fortunately, it does contain the crucial line, "Social Security faces challenges, but is not in crisis -- the Trust Fund is projected to remain solvent until 2052." Unfortunately, this point comes fifth in the list when it should be first. The president, at his still-ongoing press conference, was refreshingly candid about his strategy for Social Security abolition: He won't be outlining any specific proposal; instead he's going to simply tour the country talking up the purported crisis, singing the praises of private accounts and pressuring Congress to "do something." Then, once Congress starts producing a bill, he'll start negotiating.

This is a losing game for Democrats to play. Once the terms of the debate become "how do we solve the crisis?" then the constellation of forces inside the Beltway leads naturally to the conclusion that we solve it on Bush's terms. Even a bad bill will look good compared to passivity in the face of the program's alleged bankruptcy. So while Democrats probably will need some kind of alternative reform agen