For the past month or so I’ve been trying to find the most egregious Social Security bamboozler in the Congress. And I have to tell you that the competition is fierce — particularly in the House Republican caucus.

A serious contender, for instance, is Rep. Heather Wilson (R) of New Mexico.

Like many of her GOP colleagues in marginal districts, starting in 2002 she dropped the word “privatize” from her Social Security vocabulary. But this year she managed to take the Social Security word-game flimflam to a whole new level by fooling constituents and even reporters into thinking she opposed private accounts.

What she did was strenuously claim that she doesn’t “think government should invest Social Security funds in the stock market.”

This even garnered her a few headlines in local papers putting her down as against the Bush plan.

To most folks who figure that their member of Congress is on the level, Wilson’s statement sure sounds as if she means no private accounts. But, of course, Wilson said that government shouldn’t invest in the stock market, not that individuals shouldn’t. So nothing in her position ruled out supporting the president’s privatization plan, at least in her eyes.

It took reporters back in Albuquerque a while to get wise to Wilson’s games. But once they did and reporter Michael Coleman asked her whether she was against individuals investing Social Security funds in the stock market, she refused to answer, telling him: “I don’t play word games and I don’t deal with hypothetical situations.”

Now, according to an article last week by James Brosnan in The Albuquerque Tribune, she’s refusing to be interviewed on the subject at all.

A more scattershot approach is that preferred by Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R) of Florida, who has more Social Security recipients in her district than anyone else in Congress. Brown-Waite eschews Wilsonian verbal brainteasers to bamboozle her constituents.

In town meetings over the past week, her preferred method was to turn the conversation to the most irrelevant and off-topic subject she could think of to avoid actually discussing the questions her constituents wanted to be answered.

In one particular tour de force moment she managed to turn a discussion of Social Security’s potential funding shortfalls to the money Brown-Waite says the United States is wasting by giving aid money to the Palestinian Authority.

In a special flourish, she told listeners at the town-hall meeting in Zephyrhills that the idea of U.S. taxpayer dollars going to Palestinians makes her want to “throw up.”

(You can hear some choice portions of Brown-Waite’s presentation from Feb. 28 in the archive section at the bottom of the Web page www.wmnf.org/programming/daily.shtml?ShowId=224)

As you can see, out there on the hustings there’s a lot of competition for Social Security ridiculousness. But having read all the transcripts and field reports, I believe the prize really has to go to Rep. Chris Chocola (R) of Indiana.

Chocola’s hometown critics have a long-running battle with him, claiming that he’s repeatedly flip-flopped on Social Security — first being a big-time privatizer, then opposing privatization and now supporting the president’s plan without actually coming right out and saying that he does.

The Chocola dispute centers on what his position was on Social Security in his first unsuccessful run for Congress in 2000.

Critics say he endorsed total privatization. The congressman says that’s not true.

Unfortunately for Chocola, though, there’s something such as the written word, which puts his claim in a rather poor light.

Back in October 2000, you see, Chocola sat down with the editors of a local paper, the Elkhart Truth, and told them the following:

“Bush’s plan of individual investment of 2 percent of the money is a start. Eventually, I’d like to see the entire system privatized. It’s not a ‘risky scheme.’ There will be a series of investment options for people, professionally managed. If one isn’t performing for you, you can change every year. We’re not going to let people invest all of their money in Yahoo!

“People will be smart enough to understand their risk level. I believe people can make good decisions, and I know they ask really good questions before they make decisions. Will somebody screw it up? No question. But the government is screwing up the whole thing right now.”

I don’t want to turn over all my space this week to an at-length quote. But there’s more, and you can find it still online at www.etruth.com/news/story/229276/index.html. But I hope I’ve excerpted enough of it to make pretty clear what the guy said.

A month later, Chocola was claiming that he didn’t support privatizing all of Social Security. Two years after that he insisted that he didn’t support privatization at all. And now he insists, more or less, that he doesn’t want to talk about any of it.

With the seas getting rough, I don’t know how long he’ll hold the title. But for the moment I’d say Chocola is the Social Security bamboozler in chief.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it