Democrats won the news cycle yesterday when they slammed John Boehner for calling the economic crisis an "ant." But winning a news cycle isn't the same as winning an election. A new poll shows that the President and his party risk political suicide if they join in the mad rush to cut Social Security, and a sleight-of-hand move by the House leadership today suggests they're considering it. Cutting benefits may seem clever in Washington, where policymakers sometimes toy with the economy as if it were an ant farm. But here in the ant tunnels where the rest of us live, it's terrible politics and worse policy.
It was Barack Obama, not John Boehner, who appointed Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to co-chair the "National Fiscal Commission on Responsibility and Reform." Simpson's a longtime Social Security antagonist who's called retired Americans "greedy geezers [1]" because they don't want their Social Security payments used to fund extravagant tax cuts and military spending. (A video of Simpson's misguided and angry rant [2]drew quite a bit of attention recently.) And Erskine Bowles cut a deal with Newt Gingrich that would have partially privatized Social Security in the 1990's if the Monica Lewinsky scandal hadn't derailed their plans. (He has also revealed what Dean Baker describes as a numerological fascination [3] with using arbitrary numbers as targets.)
By creating this Commission and appointing two commissioners whose views are so far outside the political mainstream, President Obama risks endangering his own future and his party's in pursuit of a misguided policy goal. And a breaking report from Firedoglake [4] indicates that the Commission's set of recommendations - should members agree on one - will be submitted to an up-or-down vote by a lame duck Congress after the November elections, provided that the Senate passes it first. That clattering sound you just heard was the sound of Democrats picking up hara-kiri knives en masse.
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