Bush supporters' aftermath thread

Modern liberals are often pessimistic, look to the past, and are angry.

HERMAN MELVILLE'S "Bartleby, the Scrivener" tells the tale of a lawyer's assistant who inexplicably stops doing his job, instead spending his days staring blankly at a brick wall. "I'd prefer not to," he invariably tells his employer when asked to copy a paper, go to the post office or even answer a question. "No: at present I would prefer not to make any change at all," Bartleby says when asked to leave. In their response to President Bush's State of the Union address Wednesday night -- indeed, in much of their reaction to Mr. Bush's push on Social Security -- the Democrats share a disturbing resemblance to Bartleby.

Unlike Bartleby, the Democrats' maddening passivity can be excused in part by the administration's maddening evasion of hard choices. The accounts proposed by the president would not, in themselves, extend the solvency of the Social Security system by a single day. Mr. Bush not only presented his private accounts to the country as risk-free, he made none of the tough calls about what should be done to achieve solvency.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62097-2005Feb3.html

Remember yesterday when they went to pose next to FDR's statue? Talk about being mired in the past! And why? Because "they'd prefer not to" face the present.

Moynihan and Parsons Decry Partisanship
June 25, 2002

In an effort to keep the Social Security reform debate non-partisan and factual, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Richard Parsons, co-chairs of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, urged all political parties to "pursue a standard of bipartisan statesmanship" and "resist the temptation to cast the Social Security debate in partisan terms." The letter follows:

June 13, 2002

In our report to President Bush on December 21,2001, we joined the rest of the bipartisan Commission in calling for a year of national discussion of Social Security before legislative action is taken to strengthen the program. We believe that it is appropriate at this time to once again call on all participants in our national discussion to adhere to a tone that is non-partisan and factual.

Last year, we provided three models for reform for the President's consideration. Though each of these models has different characteristics, they all would include personal accounts, and each has been certified in the non-partisan analysis of the Social Security actuaries as providing higher expected total benefits than are paid today or which could be paid in the long run under existing law. Each of them would also maintain system solvency at lower cost than the existing Social Security system. The full report of the Commission, available to the public at www.csss.gov details these findings.

The Social Security system is a bipartisan responsibility. This responsibility cannot be met by approaching the issue in political or partisan terms. We are deeply concerned whenever those with responsibility for the program may be induced to foreclose constructive policy options based on erroneous or incomplete information generated in a political context.

We have a historic opportunity to adapt the system to the needs of the 21 It century by modernizing the program to reflect Franklin Roosevelt's original vision. In President Roosevelt's 1935 Message to Congress on Social Security, he argued for ultimately extending the program to include "voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the amounts received in old age." It is a measure of the bipartisan success of Social Security that a Republican President, George W. Bush, is now striving to make FDR's vision a reality through the establishment of funded personal accounts within the Social Security system.

We call on all parties to resist the temptation to cast the Social Security debate in partisan terms, and to instead pursue a standard of bipartisan statesmanship in the debate during the months ahead.

Sincerely,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Richard D. Parsons

Modern liberals are often pessimistic, look to the past, and are angry.