Among our longest-standing political clichés is that Social Security is the third rail in American politics—threaten it and you will be politically electrocuted. This could easily happen to John McCain come general election time, and here’s why:

A few years ago, 2005 to be exact, George W. Bush sidled up to the issue by proposing the creation of private social security investment accounts to supplement the present system—in effect partially privatizing the system. It didn’t take the public long to recognize that this was the first stage of the ultraconservative agenda to ultimately do away with Social Security and similar entitlements.

The response was somewhat slow to build, but soon the uproar knocked the administration back on its heels.

They tried fitfully to change the name “private” accounts to “personal” accounts, but it was too late. An overwhelming majority of the country saw privatization as a threat to the lifeline Social Security means for so many of both parties.

The move was stopped dead in its tracks—the first major legislative defeat handed Bush since he was elected. If his poll numbers were slipping because of his war in Iraq, they began to slide precipitously following this encounter with the third rail.

Now guess who voted for the Bush privatization move?

Think hard—a hint is that he is the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

But that was then—how about now?

You guessed it—John McCain still strongly supports the creation of private social security investment accounts, cautioning that it is only part of reforming Social Security.

Here’s what his campaign website says:

“John McCain supports supplementing the current Social Security system with personal accounts—but not as a substitute for addressing benefit promises that cannot be kept. John McCain will reach across the aisle, but if the Democrats do not act, he will.”
He reiterated the point in several campaign debates and interviews. On March 3 the Wall Street Journal published an interview in which he said:

“As part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it—along the lines that President Bush proposed.”

Some guys never learn. Or perhaps he is truly ideologically committed to privatization, just as he is committed to expanding and extending Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy—which he initially opposed, during his “maverick” phase.

Needless to say, the notion of privatization—even sidling up to the issue through “personal” accounts, does not sit well with senior groups and unions. The International Association of Machinists, for example, points out that “privatization would mean a 30–50% cut in benefits, with the average retiree losing $134,000 in payments over 20 years of retirement.”

The political analyst Michael Tomasky, writing in a recent New York Review of Books, took it all one step further: McCain’s economic policies, he said, “would, if enacted, combine Bush’s tax cuts with far more severe spending cuts in a way that could ultimately destabilize Social Security and Medicare, a goal fiscal conservatives have sought for decades….“

Barack Obama quietly raised the issue of McCain and privatization during a massive rally in Oregon just before the primary election there.

You can bet that will not be the end of it. Wait until the commercials begin.

In my view, the privatization issue has perhaps the greatest single potential to undo McCain; greater than the war, greater than, but related to, the economy.

Carry the message to Florida, West Virginia, any state where seniors are a significant part of the population.

Wherever there are folks who may think Obama is an “elitist,” wherever they don’t like his middle name, wherever they don’t care for his particular shade of beige, are they really going to vote against him in favor of the geezer who wants to mess with the lifeline known as Social Security?

“Straight Talk Express,” meet the Third Rail.
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Don Rose is a veteran strategist for liberal causes and candidates and is a political columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.