Obama will make huge mistake if he goes after Social Security
President Barack Obama is becoming a bigger disappointment to this New Deal Democrat by the day. If his speech inst’ about jobs, helping homeowners who are about to be foreclosed, and in general helping to recreate the middle class then it will be a failure.
As Dan Froomkin showed last week he’s playing with fire if he goes after Social Security, Obama’s Social Security Talk Is Turning Voters Off, Pollsters Say.
President Barack Obama’s apparent willingness to consider cuts in Social Security benefits may be winning him points with Washington elites, but it’s killing him with voters, who see the program as inviolate and may start to wonder what the Democratic Party stands for, if not for Social Security.
That’s the conclusion of three top progressive pollsters who spoke to reporters Wednesday at a briefing sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, the Century Foundation and Demos.
“For the public, cutting benefits is the problem, not the solution,” said Guy Molyneux, a partner at Hart Research Associates.
As a result, the pollsters said that any Democrat seeking elected office in 2012 should be begging Obama not to say anything about Social Security cuts in his State of the Union address later this month.
A post-election poll by Celinda Lake’s Lake Research Partners found that, by a margin of 3 percentage points, Americans now trust Republicans in Congress more than Democrats when it comes to Social Security — surely the first time since the program became a signature issue for the Democratic Party in the 1930s.
The poll found confidence in Democrats on the issue dropping 14 points just since January 2007, accompanied by a 13-point increase for Republicans.
The public favors congressional Republicans over Obama on Social Security by an even larger 6-point margin. Obama’s 26-percent rating is not only less than half Bill Clinton’s (53 percent), it’s even lower than that of George W. Bush (37 percent), whose proposal to privatize the program went down in flames.
It’s hard to overstate how shocking this new dynamic is. In the two previous low points for Democrats — June 1995 and April 2002 — Democrats still had a 10-point advantage on Social Security.
That the public would trust Republicans more on this issue was, until recently, inconceivable.
And the fix for this is so simple. All President Obama has to do is keep his promise.
