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04/10/2005: "The Party of Know"

Dems are taking heat from the Bush Administration as “the party of no” because they’re cool to Bush’s Social Security proposals. The Dems seem perfectly content to let the Bush proposals swing in the wind. Bush’s feigned dismay at Democrat unwillingness to play strikes me as cynically disingenuous. When the shoe on the other foot (as it was with the Clinton health plan) Karl Rove played it just the same way that Democrats are now playing Social Security. And they really have to play it this way, because Republicans aren’t really “playing.” Bush claims to be open-mindedly listening to all proposals, yet has explicitly announced that he won’t consider any of the approaches used to fix Social Security in the past. Specifically, he won’t consider allocating some of the increased gains in wealth that American society has seen in the decades since Social Security revenue inflows were last set. Also, he won’t consider a plan that doesn’t include privatization, even though such a plan diverts the money needed to fund Social Security payments already committed to retirees, and would significantly add to the same national debt that the Bush Administration has already significantly added to. The truth is that the Democratic Party, from sad experience with the Bushies, is the Party of Know. They Know how the Administration feels about bipartisanship, captured in the words of right wing ideologue Grover Norquist: “Bipartisanship is another name for date-rape.” Dems Know that any toe in the water on the Social Security debate will just give Bush’s attack ad machine content to work with. And they Know that participating in the debate is a futile exercise. Should Dems come up with a suggestion to rescue the right wing from the corner they’ve painted themselves into, they Know their ideas will go into Republican-only committee deliberations and, in the picturesque phrase from Cokie Roberts, “emerge as an elephant.”