Truth - Al Franken [81]
But as much as I’ve learned to give people the benefit of the doubt, I’ve also learned to look for leaked memos. And wouldn’t you know that in January of 2005, a memo was indeed leaked to The Wall Street Journal. It was a strategy memo written by Karl Rove’s deputy, one Peter H. Wehner:
For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win—and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country.
Hmm. Six decades. Funny, Bush had never mentioned a six-decade battle over Social Security. Let’s see. What was the right trying to do to Social Security six decades ago? Oh yes. Get rid of it! Back to Wehner:
I don’t need to tell you that this will be one of the most important conservative undertakings of modern times. If we succeed in reforming Social Security, it will rank as one of the most significant conservative governing achievements ever. The scope and scale of this endeavor are hard to overestimate.
“Conservative.” Who do many Republicans consider to be the father of the modern conservative movement? Barry Goldwater. What was Barry Goldwater’s position on Social Security? Destroy it! “Perhaps Social Security should be abolished,” he mused during his 1964 presidential campaign.
In 1978, George W. Bush was running for Congress in Midland, Texas. Social Security was facing a fiscal shortfall much worse than the one it faces today. And candidate Bush’s solution? No surprise, guys: Privatize. Gary Ott of the Plainview Daily Herald recollected that Bush told him that Social Security would go bust in ten years unless people were given a chance to invest the money themselves.
Bush wasn’t the only Republican with designs on Social Security. When Reagan was elected in 1980 with help from the Ayatollah Khomeini, anti–Social Security forces saw their big chance. David Stockman, Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, called Social Security “closet Socialism” and a “giant Ponzi scheme.” He said disability benefits were “a powerful temptation to the shiftless” and, with Reagan’s confused approval, tried to take a meat-ax to the program.
In less than a week, the Senate, in thrall to the shiftless interests, voted 96–0 against the package, and in the House, Speaker Tip O’Neill accused the GOP of trying “to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly.” The next year, twenty-six incumbent Republicans lost their seats. It was a total rout.
The year after that, a surprisingly responsible bipartisan commission chaired by a younger, wiser Alan Greenspan recommended a body of major reforms that preserved the basic structure of the program and ensured its long-term viability. Part of their grand plan was to build up an enormous trust fund so that when the baby boomers retired, Social Security would be ready.
Nothing could have pissed off the privatizers more. In light of Social Security’s overwhelming popularity, it was clear that they needed a new master strategy, something more long-range and devious. For inspiration they turned to an unlikely source: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin. That’s right. The father of the Russian Revolution.
In an article in the journal of the libertarian Cato Institute, Stuart Butler, the Heritage Foundation’s director of domestic policy studies, teamed up with Peter Germanis, a Heritage policy analyst. Although Heritage was notoriously unreliable when it came to factual arguments, it was also fiendishly clever when it came to right-wing scheming. Their piece, “Achieving a ‘Leninist’ Strategy,” was a case in point.
By “Leninist,” Butler and Germanis didn’t mean “Communist.” Far from it. It was only Lenin’s tactical brilliance that they hoped to emulate. As they wrote:
Lenin believed that capitalism was doomed by its inherent contradictions, and would inevitably collapse. But just to be on the safe side, he sought to mobilize the working class, in alliance with other key elements in political society, both