Well, what did I tell you? 

In last Thursday’s column, I noted that the president’s cross-country privatization campaign trip — now dubbed the Bamboozlepalooza Tour — was aimed far more at skittish Republicans than it was at Sens. Baucus, Conrad, Dorgan, Lincoln, the two Nelsons and Pryor.

As might have been predicted, not one of the Democrats who already opposed the president budged off their flat opposition to his plan to partially phase-out Social Security and replace it with a system of 401(k)-like private accounts. The one on the list who might possibly be in play, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, didn’t seem any closer to supporting the president than he had before — the bestowal of a new presidential nickname (“Benator”) notwithstanding.

The only folks who seemed seriously in play were the Republicans. And, as it turned out, Mr. Bush didn’t do so well.

As we did last week, let’s start in Montana.

The state’s sole member of the House — Rep. Denny Rehberg (R) — praised the president’s “Oprah Winfrey-style” approach to working the crowd. But he said he still wasn’t sold on privatization.

And Rehberg wasn’t the only one.

When the president was in Montana, the state’s other senator, Conrad Burns (R), said he would “continue to look at” the president’s plan but still had more questions, particularly about how to pay for it.

After Burns got done introducing the president at the event in Billings, a Times reporter asked Burns if he supported the president’s plan. Burns said he was still “crunching numbers” and worrying about the deficit.

To yet another reporter, Burns described himself as “intrigued” by the president’s plan but not ready to sign on. “Social Security is still a very, very important part of the retirement of a lot of seniors in Montana,” he went on to say. “So we’ll listen and we’ll look and we’ll probe ... and see what is in it for the next generation.”

If that’s the response from the state’s Republicans, you have to figure privatization isn’t going over so well in Montana.

Now on to Florida.
As noted last week, the White House clearly chose Tampa because it and the surrounding area are represented by a slew of Republicans, few if any of whom are willing to endorse publicly the president’s plan.

A sense of how well the president did can be gleaned from an article in Monday’s St. Petersburg Times about Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, whose 5th District has more Social Security beneficiaries than any other in the country. According to the article, at town meetings in the district on Monday of this week, Brown-Waite warmed up crowds by telling them how she told Bush to his face in the limo ride to the event that she wanted to “proceed cautiously” and wasn’t ready to sign on to his plan.

“He wasn’t happy with me,” she eagerly told them.

Brown-Waite even ended up talking up the AARP plan to ditch privatization and assure Social Security’s long-term solvency challenges by pushing the payroll-tax cap up to $120,000.

Others from the area are finding more straightforward ways of dealing with President Bush’s plan. According to Wednesday’s Tampa Tribune, Florida Republican Reps. Bill Young, Michael Bilirakis and Mark Foley won’t even return phone calls to talk about the subject.

The latest we hear is that on Thursday the president is going to visit North Carolina and Pennsylvania, two states with four Republican senators between them. So hopefully that will put to rest any notion that this barnstorming has anything to do with pressuring Democrats.

And one other point on the politics of Social Security while we’re on the subject. …

Karl Rove privately and Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.) publicly are now telling folks on the Hill that no incumbent in years has run on private accounts and lost. But this is just one more example that the worst thing that can happen to you in politics is to fall prey to your own spin.

The new Rove-Sununu line has several problems on the merits. But the most obvious one should clear to everyone on the Hill. To the extent that Republican congressional candidates escaped the third rail in 2002 it was largely because the Republican National Committee and the White House sold them on a comically brazen plan to deny they supported “privatization” and justify the false denial on the reasoning that “privatization” was no longer the name of their policy.

Indeed, Sununu’s own words give the game away. “Name me an incumbent member of Congress that has campaigned supporting the idea of private accounts, personal accounts, and lost,” he challenged reporters last week.

When a policy has to be renamed every cycle, you know there’s a problem.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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