I’ve thought for a while that the thing that shipwrecked President Bush’s second term was the decision to kick it off with an attempt to reform Social Security. It was brave, because this badly needs to be done (I’ve never talked to anyone in my generation or younger who thinks we’re going to get Social Security when we reach retirement—there seems to be widespread agreement that the program’s going to collapse before we get the chance), but it was also politically stupid, because it gave the Democrats all sorts of chances to beat him up. There simply wasn’t the political will to address the situation, or any sort of constituency already in place for the effort. If he’d spent a couple years building that constituency and creating a sense of urgency while he worked on other things, it might have gone somewhere; as it was, all it did was burn all his political capital and leave him defenseless when Katrina hit and Iraq went into reverse.In light of that, it was interesting to note last week that the President appears to agree with me, telling Cal Thomas that if he could do one thing over, he would have given up Social Security and gone to work on immigration reform instead. As he told Thomas, border security is a real and significant issue, as is the fact that “a system that is so broken that humans become contraband is a system that really needs to be re-examined”; while the political will wasn’t there to address the looming issue with Social Security, “because generally legislative bodies don´t react until the crisis is upon us,” even when they know it’s coming.It’s a good interview of the sympathetic sort, and worth your time to read.
