Dan Rather AND SO the game is afoot. Now that we know who the contestants will be, all that remains to be decided is the playing field. Will it be the economy and "jobs," as exit polling of Democrats and independents since the Iowa caucuses has indicated? Will it be national security, as Team Bush has telegraphed and about which Team Kerry says, "Bring it on"? Or will it be the "hot button" issue of same-sex marriage?
The answer is, probably, "all of the above." But will Social Security end up trumping them all?
Just a couple of weeks ago, the proverbial third rail of American politics didn't seem on track to make any kind of meaningful appearance in Campaign 2004. The deficit picture meant that President Bush wasn't exactly going to be trumpeting a Social Security 'private account' plan with estimated transition costs of around a trillion dollars, resurgent Wall Street or no. And with projected surpluses now a distant memory, there wasn't any call for Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry or any of the other Democrats to repeat Al Gore's 'lockbox' mantra from 2000.
But Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's recent testimony before Congress to the effect that cuts in Social Security are the only realistic way to keep the programme viable (while making the president's tax cuts permanent) seems to have given the third rail a new charge. Since the chairman spoke, the issue has once again become a fixture of the editorial and Op-Ed pages, and, perhaps more tellingly, it is something that everyday, rank-and-file Americans are talking about.
The fact is that Social Security is one of the few things, like death and taxes, that just about all Americans have in common. If you've had a job or worked on your own, you've paid into it, and chances are you expect to get out of it what you were promised going in. And like death and taxes, when Social Security is on the table, people pay attention.
So is Social Security the ideal ground for Team Kerry's run? Perhaps. The conventional wisdom is that the issue favours the party of the New Deal, and the Democrats are generally the first to invoke - or as the Republicans would have it, 'demagogue' - Social Security. Kerry will probably point to Bush assurances (remember the four $1 bills he would regularly hold up in 2000, to represent the projected surplus?) that part of the surplus would be set aside to 'save' Social Security and ask voters to consider what happened.
If a sense of urgency and crisis develops around Social Security, though, Team Bush just might find itself in a better position than the conventional wisdom realises. In such an atmosphere, the same Bush partial-privatisation proposal that Gore called 'a risky scheme' could start to look instead like a bold answer to a pressing problem.
No matter whom Social Security tends to favour this year, expect a healthy dose of chicanery and spin from all sides. On paper, the programme is funded through the next few decades. But that's just on paper. Meanwhile, the surpluses that the "pay as you go" system has accumulated have made a tempting target for "borrowing" to cover other parts of the budget. Because politicians of both parties have engaged in this ledger legerdemain, both parties have a stake in keeping the math of Social Security fuzzy.
Indications are strong that the future of one of America's bedrock entitlement programmes will feature big in the general campaign to come. And when you're playing on the third rail, you never know who's going to get shocked.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor (c) 2004 DJR Inc. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
