February 17, 2005, 7:52 a.m.
Doomed Like ClintonCare?
Opponents of Social Security reform only wish.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the February 28, 2005, issue of National Review.

Democrats believe that President Bush is making a political mistake as big as the one President Clinton made in his first two years in office. Clinton tried to get comprehensive health-care reform, and ended up losing control of Congress instead. Democrats think that Bush's effort to reform Social Security gives them an opportunity to take Congress back.

The parallels are easy to see. Social Security reform is Bush's top legislative priority, just as health-care reform was Clinton's. Republicans see Social Security reform as a way to expand the base of their party, by making all workers into capitalists. Democrats saw national health care as a way to expand their party, by making the middle class grateful for government help. Bush's party has majorities in both houses of Congress, as Clinton's had then. But Republicans were determined to deny Clinton victory, just as Democrats are dead-set against Bush. Republicans, though in the minority, were able to exert power the same way Democrats intend to do today: by filibustering the president's bill in the Senate.

Democrats have drawn several lessons from these parallels. The first is that there are political dividends in opposing big, complex presidential initiatives. Democrats once reviled Newt Gingrich, but now he is their role model. The second is that the way to defeat a president's reforms is to deny the existence of the problems those reforms are designed to address. ClintonCare was supposed to solve a "health-care crisis," and its undoing began when Republicans started saying that there was no such crisis: Most Americans liked their own health care just fine. President Bush has said that Social Security's pending insolvency constitutes a "crisis" (although he has backed off that word). Democrats are minimizing the problem and accusing Bush of exaggerating...

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