To the average person, Nancy Pelosi’s May 20 interview with George Stephanopoulos probably seemed like standard procedure for a Sunday morning talk show—another politician slipping and sliding around the questions. It was more than that.

Stephanopoulos noted that Pelosi had said—a few weeks earlier—that she would vote for the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, l which among other things proposes severe cuts in Social Security benefits, gradually raises the retirement age to 69, and calls for Medicare beneficiaries to pay more for their healthcare. Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, a fellow Democrat, had then challenged her, in an e-mail to supporters, saying “any Democratic endorsement of benefit cuts capitulates on bedrock progressive values and makes it easier for corporate Democrats to join with corporate Republicans to destroy these programs.”

That was fair game for Stephanopoulos. Did Pelosi believe that? She did not answer yes or no, exactly. Instead, she said, “The framework of Simpson-Bowles was a very important one” because “it assumed the expiration of the high-end tax cuts. It took a harsh look at all of our spending, including our defense.” Stephanopoulos asked if that included Medicare and Social Security. She mumbled something about “our defense spending” and the need for a “proper balance between cuts and revenues that we have to have.”

“What I didn’t like” about Simpson-Bowles, she continued, “was what it said about Social Security. But I said that can be handled separately. Social Security—whatever we do on Social Security—should be returned to Social Security to extend its life.” What that meant to the ordinary viewer was hardly clear.

Pelosi never did directly answer what she thought Simpson-Bowles meant for Social Security and Medicare. She did engage in subtle beltway signaling, substituting buzzwords like “job creation,” “priorities,” and achieving a “balance,” all the while allowing her words to convey that the Dems who mattered were now on board to pass the Simpson-Bowles plan, a blueprint for deficit reduction crafted by a bipartisan commission appointed by the president in early 2010 to devise a plan for the deficit. The commission was headed by former Senator Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Their plan did not receive the fourteen votes from the eighteen-member commission that were necessary for Congress to consider it. But it has since moved to the national agenda anyway.

Back in late 2010, when the commission announced its plan, Pelosi called it “simply unacceptable.” She didn’t like the idea of raising the retirement age either. A few months earlier Pelosi had said that she opposed raising the retirement age and that scaling back Social Security should not be a means of reducing the deficit.

She seemed to have moved somewhat by this past March, when the House voted on a version of the Simpson-Bowles plan. Democrats, including Pelsoi, rejected it. Still, she claimed she and her colleagues were ready to vote for it “until we saw it in print.” “If it were actually Simpson-Bowles, I would have voted for it,” she said at the time.

The Stephanopoulos interview is one of many recent smoke signals that the plan lives again.

For example, last Thursday The NewsHour explored what the European economic crisis might mean for the US. “What are the real options for policy makers?” host Judy Woodruff asked Ken Rogoff, a Harvard economics professor. Rogoff replied, “Well, we could dream they would do something like the Simpson-Bowles proposal, where they’re going to get rid of a lot of tax expenditures and be able to keep rates low, make reforms to Social Security.”

Also on The NewsHour, at the end of that defining week in late March when Pelosi hinted that she might have changed her mind, David Brooks, notified the program’s upscale and politically astute viewers that a deal might be in the offing. Said Brooks:

“One of the saddest things that has happened this week is Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, and others put together a Simpson-Bowles bill, sort of an outline, and had them vote on that. I think it got like 38 votes in the House. And so we’re going to end up there eventually. We’ll end up with something like Simpson-Bowles.”
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