In American salesmanship, the classic high-pressure strategy boils down to a pair of basic ploys. One seeks to create an intense feeling of urgency by warning us to "buy now, before it's too late!" The other tries to conjure a keen sense of opportunity by declaring whatever is on sale to be "new and improved!" Those old-fashioned slogans may sound corny, but the underlying techniques are still employed at all levels of marketing—particularly in the promotion of politicians and programs that the public would otherwise reject.
The aggressive sales force in the Bush White House has long since mastered modern marketing methods, using them to win elections and drive policy. They brought George W. Bush to power in 2000 by selling him as a new and improved "compassionate conservative."
Two years later, Bush's chief of staff candidly explained that war could be "rolled out" on a publicity schedule, like any other product, to convince voters that action against Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was urgent. We had to invade—before it was "too late" to prevent catastrophe.
Everyone who paid attention has since learned that compassionate conservatism was nothing more than a happy-sounding phrase, and that those fearsome weapons of mass destruction were at best an exaggerated folly and at worst a total fraud. Yet the eventual emergence of the truth mattered little to the Republican pitchmen. In the absence of a vigilant, independent, and critical press, they were confident that their propaganda would always prevail.
Now they are applying the same methods of deception to their drive to destroy Social Security.
The President and his conservative allies tell us that they are offering a "new and improved" version of America's most successful and efficient government program—and warning that we must buy their plan "before it's too late." They have spent many millions of dollars and invoked the prestige of the Presidency, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Social Security Administration to bulldoze us into buying their extraordinarily costly and risky privatization scheme.
Last spring, as voters learned about the trillion-dollar borrowing and enormous benefit cuts embedded in the President's proposal, the Bush administration's assault on Social Security stalled. Many Republicans in the Senate and House have expressed open skepticism about passing any legislation that resembles the radical White House scheme, while the Democrats have remained unusually united in opposition.
And as the Bush initiative foundered, right-wing publicists were forced to change the "branding" of his proposal yet again—having switched already from privatization to "partial privatization" to "personal accounts." The latest buzz phrase is "progressive indexing."
None of the marketing and re-branding schemes has succeeded in moving the unfavorable poll numbers, which show about two-thirds of the American public opposed to any significant changes in Social Security. While most Americans realize that Social Security will someday require changes, their preferred solutions differ sharply from those offered by the president and his party. Not only do voters reject privatization, but they also want no part of benefit cutbacks, revised wage and price indexes, or delayed retirement. Instead, they strongly favor what the president dislikes most: increasing the cap on Social Security taxes above the current $90,000 level.
Such public resistance is unlikely to derail the President's privatization campaign, which traces back to the Reagan era as a quixotic crusade on the fringe of national politics. Having achieved so little for so long, the would-be privatizers believe they have convinced the public that the program faces eventual ruin. With the President's determined support, they are spending tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars on propaganda—an effort that reflects decades of preparation. If their campaign can persuade people that the system must be changed, a version of their destructive "reform" could still prevail.
Whether in government or out, the privatizers have sought to provoke a "crisis" atmosphere and stoke irrational fears of "bankruptcy”—amplifying the same themes that have been emphasized by right-wing groups and politicians for many years now. With generous corporate backing, they have established "Astroturf," or phony grassroots groups, to address senior citizens, African Americans, women, and young people. They have enlisted Republican consultants and donors to mount waves of television advertising.
The privatizers have mounted a nasty offensive against the American Association of Retired Persons, whose leaders have dared to defend the interests of its 33 million members by opposing privatization. The spearhead of this attack is something called United Seniors Association, also known as USA Next, a creation of ultra-right direct-mail impresario Richard Viguerie.
Viguerie has yearned to abolish Social Security ever since he joined the Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964. Under the United Seniors letterhead, he mailed out ominous, official-looking letters to the elderly, telling them that politicians have "spent all the money" in the Social Security trust fund. If they didn't contribute to United Seniors, their checks might be endangered.
The current director of U.S.A. Next is a religious right activist and former Reagan administration official named Charlie Jarvis. He has vowed to expose the "liberalism" of AARP and "peel off" millions of its members to support the President's plan. These days, Jarvis relies less on small contributions from elderly suckers and more on funding from major corporate interests, such as drug and oil companies.
Indeed, the financial and political dimensions of the conservative effort to destroy Social Security—and dismantle the New Deal—are formidable. Arrayed behind privatization are the nation's largest and oldest corporate lobbying organizations; major Wall Street investment banks, oil companies, and pharmaceutical firms; top conservative foundations, renowned think tanks, skilled direct-mail organizations, and right-wing media outlets; and, of course, the Republican National Committee.
To some of these interests, a privatized social insurance and pension system represents a potential multi-billion-dollar bonanza in contracts and fees. To others, it means an epoch-making ideological triumph over progressive values. Together, they are determined to achieve the victory that has eluded them for the past 70 years.
Much has changed in politics since Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935—yet much remains surprisingly similar. FDR faced the unwavering hostility of the National Association of Manufacturers and the United States Chamber of Commerce, which now have renewed their determination to undo his domestic legacy.
Those powerful organizations have since come to understand that voters don't necessarily trust big business, so they hide their identity behind other names. Along with the Business Roundtable, a group of Fortune 500 companies, the U.S. Chamber and the NAM are promoting privatization behind two innocuous-sounding fronts: the "Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America’s Social Security," or COMPASS, and the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security (which sounds like it might have been founded by the labor movement).
In Roosevelt's day, the Republican right lacked the sophisticated "noise machine" that now dominates American political discourse through talk radio and cable television. The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Club for Growth, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Scaife, Olin, and Smith Richardson foundations didn't exist back then. Despite all the changes in technology and society that have occurred since the Depression era, however, the fundamental interests and ideologies that were hostile to progressive change have scarcely changed since then.
In substance if not in form, the foundations and organizations that have financed, conceived, and organized the campaign to phase out Social Security bear a close resemblance to the old elites that bitterly opposed the New Deal.
As New Deal historian Kenneth Davis explains, those titans of corporate power and wealth boasted "a large control over mass communications…an abundance of money with which to finance political campaigns…and powerful legislative lobbies." In short, a situation not so very different from what we now confront—except that the President and his party have emphatically taken the side of the elites rather than the average citizen.
The top-hatted plutocrats who spat vitriol against Roosevelt—“that man” in the White House—suffered from an image problem that their ideological heirs have taken pains to repair. Today's privatizers represent the same interests as the program's old opponents—and a few, such as former Delaware Governor Pete duPont and Richard Mellon Scaife, happen to be the direct descendants of FDR's ancient antagonists—but today they operate under friendlier-sounding names.
"Progress for America," for instance, is the well-heeled, White House-connected political committee that has sponsored some of the most frightening and misleading television commercials, which liken Social Security to the Titanic and predict that the program will "go bankrupt" if the President doesn't "rescue" it. This outfit's financiers and masterminds are tied directly to Karl Rove—and include several of the Texas donors and Beltway consultants responsible for the scurrilous "Swift Boat" ads that targeted Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in 2004.
Regardless of all the new labels and shifting slogans, however, the fundamental message of the Republican right has likewise remained essentially the same. From the beginning, conservatives combined cries of "crisis" with promises of "reform." They are constantly vowing to "save" the program they have always wanted to abolish.
Indeed, the notion that conservatives will save Social Security dates back to 1936, when Kansas Republican Alf Landon ran against FDR pledging to reform Social Security, which Landon denounced as a "hoax." The 1936 Republican Party platform flatly predicted that the federal government would be unable to pay retirement benefits to two-thirds of the elderly recipients, dismissed the Social Security program as "unworkable," and warned that "the fund will contain nothing but the government's promise to pay."
That moldy old document sounds unmistakably like the current conservative line about the Social Security Trust Fund, which is said to contain "nothing but worthless IOUs."
For more than two decades after Roosevelt's resounding victory over Landon, the reactionary enemies of Social Security were dismissed even within their own party. Among "modern Republicans" such as Senator Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush, the prevailing viewpoint was that expressed by President Eisenhower in 1956. In a letter to his brother Edgar, Ike wrote, "Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security … you would not hear of that party again in our political history." His opinion of the "Texas oil millionaires" and other politicians and businessmen who still cherished that goal was blunt: "Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Eisenhower badly underestimated his adversaries on the right, as they proved eight years later when they returned from exile to seize control of the party behind Barry Goldwater. Among the extremist positions that excited the Arizona senator's followers was his plan to abolish Social Security by making participation "voluntary." He too believed that Social Security was foredoomed because "it promises more benefits to more people than the incomes collected will provide."
The Goldwater campaign showcased a famous supporter who would go on to bigger things. On October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan made his debut in national politics with a televised speech titled "A Time for Choosing"—in which he devoted several minutes to an attack on Social Security. He too warned of the program's "fiscal shortcomings" and denounced it as a "welfare program." He endorsed the Goldwater plan, which would have dismantled Social Security. (Reagan also tossed in a grim reference to France, which he said was about to be bankrupted by its commitment to national health insurance. "They've come to the end of the road," he intoned, in the voice that would eventually become so familiar.)
Although voters repudiated Goldwaterism in a historic landslide, his movement laid the basis for the resurgence of the far right during the Reagan era and beyond. After Reagan entered the White House in 1980, he quickly abandoned his own prejudices about Social Security. Early on, ideologues in the Reagan White House floated a proposal to slash benefits, but congressional leaders of both parties instantly slapped down that idea. Several months later, Reagan appointed the bipartisan Greenspan Commission, named after its chairman Alan Greenspan, whose members urged increased payroll taxes, taxation of the benefits of upper-income retirees, expansion to cover millions of public employees, and increasing the assets of the Social Security Trust Funds. Those recommendations, signed into law by Reagan in 1983, ensured that the system could meet its commitments for 60 years.
An avowed admirer of FDR despite his own Republican conversion, Reagan ultimately ignored his right-wing clique and acted to preserve the New Deal legacy. At the same time, however, his presidency encouraged the resurgence of the far right—and thereby laid the foundations for George W. Bush's privatization campaign.
As president, Bush tipped his hand early on. Among his first initiatives, in May 2001, was naming a "Commission to Strengthen Social Security," which he duly stacked with supporters of privatization. Staffed by veterans of the Cato Institute, the oil-backed libertarian group that has sought to dismantle Social Security for decades, the commission predictably issued "option papers" that plumped for private accounts.
Everyone understood that Bush's commission was rigged. Its credibility was almost nil—and whatever little enthusiasm its members managed to generate for privatization vanished entirely with the post-9/11, post-Enron stock plunge. Suddenly, the notion of turning the financial security of the nation's elderly and disabled over to the markets didn't seem so clever. Nor did it seem wise to emphasize privatization to a wary electorate that from left to right had always cherished Social Security. Republican congressional leaders began to step back from the President's enthusiasm during the midterm election of 2002, emphatically denying that they or their members had ever favored privatization.
Not much was heard from the Republicans on this sensitive subject until after the 2004 election, when they consolidated their control of the White House and Congress. Although Bush had vaguely reiterated his endorsement of private accounts during the campaign, he resolutely refused to detail any plan or even to explain how he intended to replace the trillions of dollars that even partial privatization would drain from the Social Security Trust Fund. In theory, he had been contemplating this critical "reform" for at least four years, but he still had nothing specific to offer.
When Bush commenced his barnstorming campaign for privatization during the late winter of 2004, he continued to avoid details. Instead, like a con man conjuring visions of easy money, he spouted promises that evaporated as the outlines of his plan began to leak from the White House.
So when the President predicted that everyone would earn lucrative returns on their "personal" accounts, he never mentioned the substantial risks or the management fees that would drain away income. When he pledged that each earner would control every dollar diverted from Social Security, he never mentioned that the investment choices would be strictly limited. And when he boasted that everyone would be able to will their privatized earnings to their heirs, he forgot to say that they would actually be required to purchase annuity plans that in most cases would leave nothing to be inherited.
Meanwhile, he warned again and again that someday soon, all the taxes Americans have paid toward Social Security during our working lives will disappear when the system suddenly goes "bankrupt." (Such alarming assertions contradict his administration's confident prediction of burgeoning growth, not to mention his promise to cut the federal deficit in half—but he and his advisers don't think anyone will figure that out.)
In short, the President is selling a "new and improved" deal that nobody could afford to turn down, although he would only grin coyly when anybody asked to see the fine print. And we must buy now, before it's too late.
In both style and substance, the Bush plan resembles a massive consumer fraud. Should he and his fellow salesmen succeed, the most likely result is a national case of buyer's remorse that will last for decades. But if Americans understand the real origins and goals of these "reforms," they are unlikely to buy into the raw deal.
