The road show reviews are in, and they’re not pretty. The Bush administration’s message on Social Security, it seems, isn’t ready for the big leagues just yet.
Jesse Taylor at Pandagon picks up on the coverage of Treasury Secretary John Snow’s speech yesterday in Bozeman, Montana. Snow told his audience “personal accounts for young workers would be cost-free for the existing Social Security system and would not affect benefits to retirees or near-retirees.”
“Why wouldn’t we do this? I have not heard one good reason not to and it’s hard to figure out why anybody would oppose it,” Snow told his audience.
To that, Jesse replies: “Maybe because you just either lied or have no idea what you’re talking about? It is entirely possible that in the fantasy world of John Snow, nobody has successfully made an argument against the plan he’s thinking about. It’s because nobody else has ever heard of this plan.” The Carpetbagger also sees inconsistencies — and some breathing room for Democrats:
Bush’s failures in making his Social Security pitch include a variety of astounding elements, but for me the most surprising is the White House’s inability to craft a clear, consistent message. These guys eat, sleep, and breathe message discipline, but on the president’s signature domestic policy goal, they can’t keep their pitch on track.
Yesterday, the inconsistencies reached an almost silly level with John Snow.
Bush keeps kvetching that Dems don’t want to join him at the negotiating table. Given the past couple of months, it seems more important to get Bush’s staff and cabinet together for a discussion first. They can get their act together; then we’ll talk.
Innumeracy — or “mathematical illiteracy” — is on Captain Ed’s mind. He is troubled by the data in a new report from the UN on malnutrition among Iraqi children, which directly contradicts earlier UN data. According to the new report, the rate of malnutrition in children under five has almost doubled since the US-led invasion — to nearly 8% by the end of last year. Writes Capt. Ed:
Sounds absolutely horrid, right? The bloody Americans came in and wrecked all those baby-milk factories…and now the little children of Iraq suffer more under democracy than they did under tyranny. Only that’s not exactly how the UN painted the picture [in an earlier report on the subject]….
Next the Captain links to earlier, pre-war UNICEF data on malnutrition in Iraq that found that “25% of Iraqi children under the age of 5 were chronically malnourished, and that 12.5% of them died before even reaching the age of five. “Now that the war is over, only 8% of them are chronically malnourished, and the UN doesn’t even talk about excess mortality in that age group any more,” writes the Captain. “Somehow that gets transformed in Turtle Bay as `doubling,’ rather than `reducing by two-thirds.'” Ed sees an anti-American agenda at work in the wildly at-odds-with-itself UN data.
Bill Kavanagh at Bill’s Big Diamond Blog interrupted the second annual Red Sox Spring Training Visit with a detour to Pinellas Park earlier this week, before the death of Terri Schiavo. He writes sensitively of a town that became “the epicenter of death and dying in public policy.”
Perhaps in Pinellas Park, some people of even the most conservative backgrounds have the uneasy feeling that the country has been brought unwillingly into a battle that has more gray area than the culture war zealots want to admit. It could be that most folks want our public life to be about things the government and legislators can do to improve and save the lives of many, not merely to involve itself opportunistically in the struggle of one family at life’s sad ending.
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.