Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Republican candidate for president of the United States, has not so much touched the third rail of politics, Social Security, as he has grabbed it in both hands and started to wrestle with it.
In his book, "Fed Up," Perry has suggested that the original enactment of Social Security did violence to the Constitution. When given the opportunity to walk back from that position recently is Des Moines, Iowa, Perry refused to do so. Indeed Perry went on to call Social Security a "monstrous lie" for young people and a "Ponzi scheme" in Ottumwa, Iowa.
One wonders whether President Barack Obama, the Democrats and the AARP are swooning from horror at the audacity of Perry's position or with glee at all the opportunities he has given them to demagogue it.
Perry's prescription for fixing Social Security is a little less audacious than abolishing it, which one would suspect one would do if it were actually unconstitutional. His ideas are rather conventional, including raising the retirement age and means testing.
Democrats have been blocking attempts to reform Social Security for generations by scaring senior citizens that they won't get their checks if such measures were allowed. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich might have actually accomplished it between them had not the Monica Lewinsky affair intervened, according to a book on the Clinton era.
President George W. Bush's reform attempts, which included siphoning off some Social Security money for private investment accounts, went nowhere. President Obama has displayed no interest in altering Social Security in any manner whatsoever.
No doubt the same political coalitions which have blocked social security reform so many times before are gearing up to do it again, by attacking Perry for attacking the program. However, Perry may have been onto something when he raised Social Security as an issue.
While protest movements in Europe demonstrate and even riot, demanding that various governments give them more programs and money, the United States is unique in having its own protest movement that is demanding that the government do less. The tea party has already changed the face of American politics in ways that would have been inconceivable when President Obama was elected almost three years ago. Perry may be gambling that things have changed enough so that people are ready to hear proposals to change a retirement system that has been extant for almost 80 years.
During previous attempts to reform Social Security and other entitlements, Republicans have had a tendency to back down into embarrassed silence when the attack machine cranks up. Perry may have an advantage in his John Wayne style of not backing down, and pressing his point. The forces against reform have never confronted such a person before. That suggests that at long last the time to revamp social security into a modern retirement system may at last be at hand.
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