With their push to restructure Social Security off to a rocky start, Bush administration officials have begun citing two Democrats -- former President Bill Clinton and the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- to bolster their claims that the retirement system is in crisis.
But the gambit carries some risk, Bush supporters say. Clinton's repeated calls during his second term to "save Social Security first" were specifically to thwart what President Bush ultimately did: cut taxes based on federal budget surplus projections. Likewise, internal Treasury Department documents indicate that Moynihan, a New York Democrat who was co-chairman of Bush's 2001 Social Security Commission, expressed misgivings about the president's push to partially privatize Social Security.
Nonetheless, White House officials -- and some Democrats -- say invoking Clinton and Moynihan could help move the Social Security debate beyond the question of whether there is a "crisis" in the system, and on to what to do about it.
"As we move forward with our efforts to talk about the problem and the need for reform, administration officials are talking about what leaders of the Democrat Party have said about the problem," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.
In public speeches recently, N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten, both cited the same passage of a 1998 Clinton speech at Georgetown University.
"This fiscal crisis in Social Security affects every generation," Clinton said in the speech.
But neither Mankiw nor Bolten cited another passage from the same address: "Before we spend a penny on new programs or tax cuts, we should save Social Security first. I think it should be the driving principle . . . Do not have a tax cut. Do not have a spending program that deals with that surplus. Save Social Security first."
"The Bush White House should have read Clinton's speeches before they squandered the Clinton surplus," said Bruce Reed, who was Clinton's domestic policy chief at the time of the speech.
When Bush entered office, conservatives active in the Social Security debate, including Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) and Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute, urged him to tackle Social Security while the government projected a 10-year, $5.6 trillion budget surplus, before pursuing his 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax cut. But Bush signed five tax cuts in four years, totaling nearly $1.9 trillion over the next decade.
"In 2001 we faced a recession, an economy declining, and the president was concerned about people needing work," Buchan said, explaining why Bush pushed his tax cut first.
Moreover, Clinton never proposed diverting Social Security taxes from current beneficiaries to private investment accounts, as Bush has suggested, Clinton aides said. Instead, he proposed using the surplus to finance personal savings accounts on top of the Social Security system, said Jeffrey B. Liebman, a Harvard University economist who helped draft Clinton's Social Security plans.
"President Clinton did believe it was better for the country to act early on Social Security by increasing savings and protecting Social Security's guaranteed benefit structure," said Gene B. Sperling, who directed Clinton's National Economic Council during the Social Security push. "Clinton never suggested that the Social Security solvency challenge required radical restructuring."
Some Bush supporters said enlisting Clinton's words posed a more basic risk: "He's alive and well and able to reinterpret his comments at any point," said David C. John, a Social Security analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Moynihan died in 2003. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow invoked his memory Thursday in a Wall Street Journal column. But documents from the Social Security Commission, leaked by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, indicate that Moynihan was ambivalent.
