About 16 percent of Americans regularly receive Social Security benefits, but these people aren't proportionately scattered throughout the country. Some states -- like Alaska, California, Colorado and Texas, places with a relatively young population -- have comparatively few Social Security beneficiaries. Only 9 percent of Alaskans, for instance, receive a Social Security check each month. By contrast, in West Virginia, the state with the largest percentage of Social Security beneficiaries, 22.4 percent of the residents are on Social Security. West Virginians, of course, chose Bush in November. Indeed, it turns out that if you look at the Social Security Administration's breakdown of Social Security beneficiaries by state, many states with a high percentage of people on Social Security are also Bush states. Of the 10 states with the largest share of the population receiving benefits -- West Virginia, Maine, Arkansas, Florida, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Iowa, Mississippi and Missouri -- only two (Maine and Pennsylvania) weren't carried by Bush.
Now, the fact that Bush won a lot of states with older populations is partly a reflection of the fact that Bush won a lot of states, period. Some of the states are very small and didn't count much toward Bush's electoral victory. Still, regardless of size, each of these senior-citizen-packed red states enjoys two votes in the U.S. Senate, where the Social Security fight is expected to come to a head -- and one can imagine that senators from those states are probably agonizing over whether to side with Bush, whom their constituents clearly love, or to keep Social Security just as it is now, which is another thing their constituents love.
The few polls that have been conducted in some red states would seem to counsel politicians against lining up too close to the White House's plan. In a recent North Carolina poll, for instance, 46 percent of the respondents said they disapproved of the Bush plan, while only 31 percent favored it. In Kentucky, the plan polls at 49 to 40, with opponents in the lead. In Montana, twice as many residents are opposed to the plan as are in favor. But pollsters warn that opinion on Social Security is "fluid"; the public is open to changing its mind, and Bush has been campaigning around the nation in an attempt to persuade Americans, as well as nervous senators, to sign on.
He may well succeed, Frank predicts. "If Bush rams it through, and I suspect he will, it could be very costly for Republicans," he adds. "It has the potential to be a huge disaster for them politically."
The disaster could come when social conservatives, people who've been duped into voting for the GOP on the assumption that it was the party of morals (rather than of money), might finally see the truth. If, as some economists predict, Social Security privatization goes badly for working people, with traditional benefits cut and stock market gains diminutive, wouldn't family-values voters realize that the Republican Party has diminished the value of their checking accounts? Couldn't Republicans possibly lose some elections over it?
Possibly. That's why most Republicans in Congress aren't jumping for joy over the Bush plan. But when it comes to Social Security reform, Frank argues, the White House and other Republican leaders may be willing to pay any price. Social Security is, after all, the linchpin of the American welfare state, the most popular and well-regarded entitlement program. By privatizing it, Republicans will achieve a long-standing ideological goal. They'll be fundamentally altering the government's responsibility to its citizens, profoundly realigning the nation in favor of the stock-market-invested rich and against the interests of the poor. As Frank says, they'll be repealing the New Deal -- and such a grand mission, they may feel, might be worth losing a few elections over.
"The leadership and the big thinkers don't care that this is going to be an extremely disastrous issue 10 years from now," Frank says. "They think they can get out of bearing the consequences of anything with some slick talk. After all, nobody blames Reagan for budget deficits anymore. And here, you're talking about such an enormous change, it will be impossible for Democrats to put it back the way it was. It's such a huge change that it will be permanent; they can't put it back once it's done."
But if it's true that the business-community Republicans are willing to lose some elections over Bush's Social Security proposal, it's also true that social conservatives aren't committed to the plan. Social conservatives, Viguerie says, are not convinced that Bush's Social Security plan is worth a steep political price. Many people think, he says, that "maybe we don't need to stick to our neck out on it." And if Republicans are going to stick their necks out, if they're going to do something that may be politically costly, social conservatives would prefer that it be something that promotes family values.
"We couldn't help but notice the contrast between how the president is approaching the difficult issue of Social Security privatization, where the public is deeply divided, and the marriage issue where public opinion is overwhelmingly on his side," the Arlington Group wrote in its letter to the White House. "Is he prepared to spend significant political capital on privatization but reluctant to devote the same energy to preserving traditional marriage? If so, it would create outrage with countless voters who stood with him just a few weeks ago, including an unprecedented number of African-Americans, Latinos and Catholics who broke with tradition and supported the president solely because of this issue."
Were it up to conservatives, Viguerie says, the White House would be pursuing wholly different plans in its second term. For the right wing, the absolute first priority, he says, is the nomination of conservative federal judges. After that, "social conservatives are concerned about homosexual marriage and the whole moral direction of the country. We would like to see the Republicans out there trying to right the country from a moral perspective. It seems like Republican politicians are for the most part embarrassed to talk about these issues, but we would like to see them do it."
In addition, Viguerie says, conservatives want Republicans to limit government spending -- something that Bush, who has not vetoed a single piece of legislation while in office, has been reluctant to do. "This administration has been a great disappointment in terms of the size and role of government," Viguerie says. Bush's recent budget proposal, which called for a large number of cuts to social programs, "wasn't very impressive" to conservatives. The cuts "were in areas where Congress is likely to ignore Bush," Viguerie points out. "Now, if he goes out and campaigns to abolish agencies and uses his political muscle, it'd be more impressive. But right now it seems like it might be window dressing. He proposes cuts that he knows the Congress is not going to make. He should be vetoing bills all the time. Roosevelt used to tell his aides, 'Give me a bill to veto.' This president seems to be obsessed with being liked by Congress, so it's hard to take him serious. It puts the lie to the president's words that he wants to reduce the size of government."
To be sure, there are social conservatives who disagree with Viguerie and don't see the president's push for Social Security privatization as an impediment to the success of their social issues. James Bopp Jr., a prominent Republican lawyer from Indiana, says that liberals -- people like Frank -- who claim to see a split between the aims of big-business conservatives and social-values conservatives are engaging in wishful thinking. Bush's signing of a ban on late-term abortions, his call in the State of the Union address for a ban on gay marriage, and other socially conservative measures have been greatly appreciated by the religious right, Bopp says, and the right won't balk at the Social Security plan.
Stephen Moore, the president of the Free Enterprise Fund and a longtime proponent of Social Security privatization, said the same thing. "I think it's an issue that all conservatives care about. I don't see a divide in the party."
That may be so. Yet it's hard to believe that conservatives are entirely satisfied with the new Bush term, in which the first major piece of legislation signed by the president didn't have anything to do with abortion, gay marriage, indecency on TV or the general moral direction of the country. Instead, the president's first bill, signed last week, curtailed the reach and scope of class-action lawsuits; it was a bill greatly favored by the business community.
"I'm not saying we should not be worried about Bush pursuing the culture wars," Frank says. "But so far his priorities are clearly the economic things. He got elected with these culture wars, but look at what we have to deal with -- every single issue is economic, having to do with malpractice, class-action lawsuits, Social Security. The culture wars are nowhere."
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
About the writer
Farhad Manjoo is a staff writer for Salon Technology & Business.
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