Where Does the Bean Soup Fit In?

The Democrats came with their customary charts. Baucus had two. Conrad had a half-dozen, bathed in red ink. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) didn't have his own charts, so he started by saying, "Let me just use one of Senator Conrad's charts here."

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) frowned on these displays. "We come up here with our charts and our numbers and our political gobbledygook," he said. Lott invoked his 91-year-old mother and directed Pozen to explain the situation "in as common-sense language as you can."

"Okay," Pozen began. "Taking your mother, she has a replacement ratio now of, let's say, 40 or 50 percent. And if we move completely from wage to price indexing, we're going to reduce her replacement ratio from something like 40 or 50 percent to something . . . like 25 or 30 percent."

Pozen, used by the Democrats as a proxy for the Bush plan, got most of the questions. This changed abruptly midway through the session when Pozen, without any public announcement, picked up his beach bag and walked out of the room, never to return. (He had a meeting in Boston.) Ferrara took advantage of Pozen's disappearance to deliver an impassioned and unprompted speech, until Lott cut him off by saying, "We appreciate your energy and enthusiasm, Mr. Ferrara."

It wasn't just Ferrara. While Bush had a Social Security round table in Texas, dozens of lawmakers and interest groups held at least six separate events to coincide with the Finance Committee hearing. The largest of these was the liberal groups' "Rally to Stop Privatization."

There, James Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt's grandson, introduced Democratic lawmakers, who gleefully needled Bush over polls showing him losing the public-opinion fight over individual accounts. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (N.Y.) delighted the audience by giving Bush three pieces of advice, paraphrasing a Jim Croce song: "One, you don't spit against the wind. Two, you don't look under the Lone Ranger's mask, and three, you don't mess with our Social Security."

The speeches done, the Democrats on the stage joined hands overhead and danced to a Tom Petty tune that seems to have become the minority party's anthem "in a world that keeps on pushin' me around":

Well, I won't back down; no, I won't back down

You can stand me up at the gates of hell

But I won't back down . . .