Social Security skepticism runs deep red

By Josh Marshall - 02/16/05 08:00 PM ET

When a reporter wants to get a handle on whether President Bush will have trouble keeping all his Republicans in line on a major vote, the first place to go is usually to those remaining “Northeastern moderates.” Perhaps you put in a call to Sen. John McCain’s office, too.

But the big story this year in the Social Security privatization debate is that that’s really not where the president is having his difficulties. The most vocal Republican dissenters come not only from parts of the country that supported the president last November, they tend to come from those areas where the president got his staunchest support: from rural and culturally red districts in the South and Midwest.

To be sure, the Northeasterners are doing their part, too. Though Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.) has been buffeted back and forth in recent weeks, he continues to signal deep skepticism about the president’s plan. And, as you might expect, he’s receiving the ad-buy attention of Pat Toomey’s Club for Growth for his troubles.

But Boehlert is far from typical of the GOP’s privatization dissenters.

A better example is Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R) from southeastern Missouri’s 8th District. Emerson has won reelection with 72 percent of the vote in her past two reelection campaigns, and her lifetime American Conservative Union rating clocks in at a respectable 88 percent.

As far back as Jan. 2 — well before the president’s plan hit rough waters — she told reporters: “We ought to get the budget back in balance and restrain spending, quit spending money like drunken sailors and then look at where Social Security is when we’ve done that.”

Then, in a constituent letter from late January, she went much further.

While most of the president’s supporters are sticking closely to his pledge of no benefit cuts for those 55 and over, Emerson is more categorical. “I continue to oppose any cut in Social Security benefits for Americans who have, in good faith, paid into the system,” she writes.
Private accounts? “I cannot support any plan to allow workers to place any portion of their Social Security taxes in risky investments, especially those that depend upon the stock market to appreciate in value.”

As for whether there’s a Social Security “crisis” that demands immediate attention, she said that “Social Security reform is not necessary at all if Congress would seriously address Medicare reform, balance the budget, erase the trade deficit, and make pension reform a real priority.”

Rep. Virgil Goode (R) from Southside, Va., is another example. In a letter from last month, he told constituents he was “negatively inclined toward these private accounts funded out of the Social Security tax.”

To the local paper, the News & Record, he was blunter still: “”I can’t see establishing private accounts using Social Security funds. I want the benefits to be assured for our senior citizens so they’re not jerked around.”

Other similarly situated Republican members of Congress include Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, freshman Rep. Geoff Davis of Kentucky and Rep. Jerry Moran of Kansas.

Rogers told the Montgomery Advertiser that he would be “a pretty hard sell” for the president’s plan because it was “too risky” for his constituents. Davis told the Cincinnati Enquirer straight out that he wouldn’t support private accounts. And Moran told the local paper a week ago that he disliked “the connection of those accounts with the Social Security system” because he feared the transition costs as well as the need for future spending to prop up retirees whose accounts didn’t pan out or lost money.

In a sense, none of this should be surprising. These five representatives all come from districts with older demographics and low average incomes relative to other parts of the country. These are regions with higher percentages of Social Security recipients and ones where recipients rely more on those checks they receive. The tough go of it the president had recently in the prairie states is another example of the same pattern.

For years, Democrats have believed that they could appeal to the pocketbooks of voters from these parts of the country only to find that social and cultural issues and national defense trumped those concerns at the ballot box — and increasingly in recent years. That worked for Bush last November. But on Social Security, a very different pattern is emerging.

In some of the reddest parts of the country, this foundation stone of the New Deal still seems to have some life in it and some juice in that third rail for anyone who grabs hold of it meaning to do it harm.