NY Times

Can Anyone Unseat F.D.R.?
By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: January 23, 2005

WASHINGTON — To some Republicans, the start of this presidential term is their moment, their chance to become the permanent majority party with a new vision that goes by various names: the ownership society, the Conservative New Deal, the New New Deal.

But can they really significantly trim seven decades of ever-growing programs? Can the New Deal government be rolled back?

Even some devout conservatives doubt that this can happen, and not only because of Democratic opposition. The skeptics believe that most Americans are unwilling to change the only kind of government that most of them have ever known.

After all, Americans love to talk about self-reliance, but they also love to vote for politicians who have been providing them with pensions, disability checks, health benefits, farm subsidies and other payments that have kept the government expanding through Republican as well as Democratic administrations, and especially during Mr. Bush's first term.

Even during the Reagan years, when domestic spending slowed, many Republicans considered it politically suicidal to attack seriously the culture of entitlements. Invoking what Jude Wanniski, the supply-side advocate, called the Two Santa Claus Theory, they resolved to compete with Democrats by cutting taxes instead of taking away benefits, the idea being that they would never succeed by playing Grinch.

Some of the regulatory apparatus of the New Deal was dismantled during the Carter and Reagan administrations, but since then there's been relatively little deregulation and lots of trees killed to print new rules in The Federal Register. The welfare rolls were reduced in the 1990's, but the disability rolls were swelled by workers who learned how to qualify for lifetime income supports and free medical coverage.

The Republicans can point to some steps toward self-reliance, like the rise of 401(k) and other personal retirement accounts in place of corporate pensions, and the expansion of personal health-savings accounts in the latest Medicare bill. But that Medicare bill championed by Mr. Bush also contained a prescription drug benefit that was the costliest new entitlement in decades.

As they now take on Social Security, Republicans are counting on a more independent group of Americans, who are comfortable with placing their savings in the financial markets. And if Americans can be weaned from the Democrats' most cherished social program, the Republicans figure, the federal government will never be the same.

"Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," said Stephen Moore, the former president of Club for Growth, an antitax group. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

Democrats are betting that Mr. Bush's proposal will backfire with voters loath to risk any of their retirement money.

"We need a strong safety net," Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts said in a recent speech. Vowing to defeat the proposal, he echoed Roosevelt's denunciations of stock-market speculators by declaring, "We will not let any president turn the American dream into a nightmare for senior citizens and a bonanza for Wall Street."

President Bush is careful not to sound that menacing. In his inaugural speech, he promised that the new ownership society would make "every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny," but quickly explained that this would provide "greater freedom from want and fear" - a purposeful echo of the same guarantees that Roosevelt made for the New Deal.

And given the popularity of Social Security, virtually no one is suggesting going back to the laissez-faire retirement days before the New Deal. Senator John Sununu, Republican from New Hampshire, said "the prospect for reforming Social Security is better than it has been in decades." But he also said any alterations would undoubtedly offer some guaranteed minimum pension from the government.

Americans are wary of change. Some polls have found that allowing private Social Security accounts is favored by a majority of Americans, with support especially high among young people, but the support drops when pollsters mention that private accounts could be risky. If asked to choose between a system with private accounts and a system with guaranteed benefits, people tend to prefer the guaranteed payments.

But then, people also repeatedly tell pollsters they're not sure they can count on guaranteed payments from Social Security. In the New York Times/CBS News poll conducted from Jan. 14 to Jan. 18, only a quarter of the respondents said that Social Security could be fixed with minor changes, while half said it needed fundamental changes and a quarter said it needed to be completely redone.

"There's so much softness in response to questions on Social Security because the public hasn't really made up its mind," said Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center. "There are a lot of conflicting sentiments, and which strain of thinking comes out on top depends on the struggle for public opinion this year."

Edward H. Crane, the president of the Cato Institute, said the way for Mr. Bush to win that fight is to emulate Ronald Reagan.

"Reagan tapped into a basic American sentiment that frightens the establishment figures, who assumed everyone wants the government to run their lives," said Mr. Crane, who has been promoting private Social Security accounts for more than two decades. "That New Deal was a sharp departure from the traditional American respect for the individual. If Bush plays this correctly - and Karl Rove is a very smart guy who's looked at the same polls we have - he can win simply by arguing that a private account gives you control over your retirement instead of making you dependent on 535 politicians."

But Americans also tend to be suspicious of radical reform, as Newt Gingrich discovered after he became speaker of the House of Representatives and tried to enact his Contract With America.

In his new book, "Winning the Future," Mr. Gingrich promotes the private accounts for Social Security and health care. But he cautions Republicans not to scare voters with any talk of reducing Social Security benefits.

"If you frame the private Social Security accounts as giving your children the right to choose, as opposed to cutting benefits or forcing anyone to do anything, I think it's a total winner for us," Mr. Gingrich said in an interview. "The accounts will create the first 100 percent capitalist society in history. Fifty years from now, relatively poor Americans for the first time will have their own personal savings; they'll see the power of interest buildup over time and appreciate the importance of property."

And in the end, even if Mr. Bush doesn't make much progress toward his ownership society in this session of Congress, some believe that he is gradually transforming Washington, setting the stage for changes the way that Ronald Reagan made possible changes to the welfare system in the following decade.

Representative John Spratt of South Carolina, the senior Democrat on the budget committee, pointed to a provision in the Medicare bill allowing some managed-care firms to compete with the government program, as an example of their gradualist approach.

"The changes have been done in a kind of disaggregated way," Mr. Spratt said. "People will only see the trend looking backward some years from now. The trend is towards less government, fewer benefit programs and significant changes in those that exist."

But others doubt that even gradual change is possible - or, for that matter, really desired by Republicans seeking re-election.

"The ownership society sounds good and grand, but I don't see it has much substance," said Robert Higgs, a fellow at the Independent Institute and author of "Against Leviathan," a libertarian critique of Social Security and other programs. "The idea that the government will be your savior and protector is so ingrained in the populace that it's impossible to stamp out."
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The entire article is very interesting, far more so than just the bolded part.
The reason why I bolded it is that it is interesting to see the utopian views from the right, which are not often spoken about in public. Many bash leftist utopian views (and rightfully so), but the belief that a society could function perfectly as a 100% capitalistic society is equally as fantasy-based.

The Other Side of The Coin

Some See Risks For the G.O.P. in New Strength

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and RICHARD W. STEVENSON
NY Times

Published: January 24, 2005

ASHINGTON, Jan. 23 - President Bush begins his second term with the Republican Party in its strongest position in over 50 years, but his clout is already being tested by Republican doubts about his domestic agenda, rising national unease about Iraq and the threat of second-term overreaching, officials in both parties say.

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With this election producing a second-term Republican president and solid majorities in both the Senate and the House, Mr. Bush's party is more dominant than at any time since Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928. As Mr. Bush embarks on an explicit effort to put an imprint on politics and policy that will long outlast his presidency, his advisers are heady over what several described as an opportunity to make a long-lasting realignment in the nation's political balance of power.

But even those advisers said Mr. Bush had at most two years before he faced the ebb that historically saps the authority of a second-term incumbent, a relatively short time to sell his far-reaching agenda. And Republicans say his situation could be complicated by the absence of an obvious heir, opening the way for competing wings of the party to battle over details and tactics on the very issues Mr. Bush is embracing.

Richard Norton Smith, a presidential scholar who is director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, said the Republican Party had "come closer now than they've been at any time in my lifetime" to being the nation's majority party. But Mr. Smith said historical cycles over the past century suggested that its dominance might be coming to a close.

"The calendar alone tells you this conservative cycle is long in the tooth," he said. "Add to that the divisions, or latent divisions, that exist with your own coalition. Once Bush is removed from the scene, and once he becomes in effect a lame duck, all those tensions are there."

The White House has described the election results as a mandate, and in his Inaugural Address on Thursday, Mr. Bush laid out his vision in sweeping terms.

But some Republicans said they were worried about overconfidence, including Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who invoked his experience serving alongside Speaker Newt Gingrich when Republicans captured the House in 1994. "Hubris is deadly," Mr. Sanford said.

And Gary Bauer, a conservative who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, said that while he applauded Mr. Bush's ambition in pursuing two major domestic goals - overhauling Social Security and the tax code - those issues, if handled incorrectly, could undercut Mr. Bush's long-term goal for the party.

"They could provide the president's opponents with fodder for some of the old canards, that Republicans don't want a social safety net, that they're the party of the rich, all those things," Mr. Bauer said. "It's going to take a very astute effort and massive amounts of presidential involvement to keep that from happening."

Mr. Bush got a reminder on the Sunday talk shows of the difficulties he faces, as Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican who is talking about running for president, said on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" on ABC that he did not believe the White House had a strategy to extricate the United States from Iraq. On "Meet the Press" on NBC, Representative Bill Thomas of California, the head of the Ways and Means Committee, laid out his own ideas for how to change the retirement system, which were to a large degree different from what the White House has suggested.

Democrats, even while struggling with their own party divisions and confusion, are showing signs of coalescing into an aggressive opposition party, especially on issues like judicial appointments and Social Security.

Mr. Bush has repeatedly overcome doubts about his ability to win approval of controversial proposals. And his political advisers are confident going into this second term. They say that the party is poised to at least begin the broad political realignment and the diminishment of the Democratic Party that has been a goal of Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.

"It is now fair to say that today the Republican Party is the dominant party in America," said Ken Mehlman, the new Republican National Committee chairman. "It's not a deep majority, it is not a broad majority, but it is a very strong majority."

"Now what does that mean?" Mr. Mehlman continued in an interview at his new office on Capitol Hill. "We're certainly not in the position that F.D.R. Democrats were in the 1930's and 40's. We're not the overwhelming favorite. There are going to be challenges. We're going to lose elections sometime. But it does mean we're in a very strong position."

Before 2001, the last time Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress was 1953. Gary Jacobson, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, argued that given the longevity and margins of Republican control in the House and Senate over the past decade, this was the most powerful period the party had enjoyed since 1928, the year Hoover was elected and Republicans held 56 Senate seats and 267 House seats. The numbers now are 55 and 232.

With this presidential election, the Democrats lost a nearly 30-year advantage in party identification in presidential elections; in a survey of voters leaving the polls, 37 percent said they were Republican and 37 percent said they were Democrats. Mr. Bush won by nearly three million votes, after losing the popular vote last time. He drew more than 11 million more votes than in 2000; by contrast, Mr. Kerry drew about 8 million more votes than Al Gore, the Democratic candidate in 2000.

It is a sign of Republican ascendance that the party is already forcing its opponents to re-examine some of their most strongly held positions. Democrats, for example, have been openly discussing whether to decrease their emphasis on one of their touchstone issues, abortion rights, after an election in which Mr. Bush ran aggressively as an opponent of abortion.

Still, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, disputed the long-term meaning of the gains, arguing Democrats would have won the White House had 60,000 votes shifted in Ohio, and said Mr. Bush had enjoyed a "huge advantage" because of the attacks of Sept. 11.

"George Bush is in serious difficulties on Social Security, tax reform, all the cornerstones of the Bush agenda that the Republicans can't agree on," Mr. McAuliffe said.

And even Republicans acknowledge there are questions about the durability and significance of the changes taking place. Most fundamentally, it is difficult today to measure whether the Republican successes of 2002 and 2004 were merely a ratification of Mr. Bush himself - a president running for re-election in wartime - or the start of a long-lasting shift to the Republican Party.

"It's still a story waiting to be told," Matthew Dowd, a senior Bush campaign adviser, said. "You can't say after a national election that you won by 2.7 percent nationally, and a lot of states were close, that the Republican Party is going to be dominant."

The critical question for Mr. Bush, his advisers and Democrats say, is the success or failure of his agenda, both in terms of getting it through Congress and winning support for it from the public. Recent polls show apprehension about important aspects of his Social Security plan, and an overwhelming sentiment that Mr. Bush does not know how to end the war in Iraq, which is increasingly unpopular.

And Governor Sanford of South Carolina pointed to the public perception of an economy in trouble, saying, "If we were to see some sort of storm in our economy, well, there are advantages to holding all the cards, and there are disadvantages."

Republican leaders say the challenge now is to deliver on the ambitious agenda Mr. Bush set out in the 2004 campaign. He is trying to persuade Congress and the American people to embrace his plan to reshape Social Security by adding private investment accounts and to create a new tax system that rewards more saving and investment. He wants to reduce the costs that lawsuits and regulations impose on businesses and put more conservative judges in the nation's courtrooms.

Against the backdrop of continued violence in Iraq, he is seeking to rally the nation behind a national security policy that is at once pre-emptive, interventionist and wrapped in a moral imperative to spread freedom.

If he can succeed at all or even most of those undertakings, and those changes leave voters feeling more prosperous and secure, it could usher in an enduring change in the balance of political power in the nation, Mr. Bush's aides say. If he fails, Republicans may well remember this moment as little more than a fleeting alignment of the political stars: the short-lived victory of an incumbent president running for re-election in wartime against an unsteady opponent and a weakened opposition party.

David Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale, suggested that Mr. Bush's task was not easy and that the historical import of his victory had been overstated.

"I do not think this is a lasting, mountainous achievement in terms of building coalitions," Professor Mayhew said. "Knowing what we know now, the presidential election of 2008 is probably a tossup."

Hes from Yale, you would assume he could substantiate his opinion rather than hiding behind ambiguity.

"Knowing what we believe to think we know is that there is a possibility of a tossup for 2008, probably."

If you cannot come up with reasonable conjecture, why bother saying anything at all?

Other than that both articles were excellent I read them at work this morning.

Thanks dbf!

I was hoping that they could spark some conversation.