Conventional wisdom within the MSM these days is that President Bush's proposed reforms of Social Security, primarily personal savings accounts, are dead. To justify this rationale, they simply point to recent poll numbers which show that public support for PSA's is only around 45%. To them and their Democratic friends, Social Security reform and the president's momentum are dead, and he will be forced to simply ride out these last four years as a lame duck.
But as is usually the case, the MSM and the Democratic Party are a little too cocky, a little to soon. As Byron York of National Review points out, things are going just as the president and the White House expected they would. From the very beginning the president and his strategists have believed that before you can convince the public to support your reforms, you must convince them that there is a reason to reform in the first place. Only after you have done this can you start to make the pitch for specific reforms and legislation.
This is a good, sound strategy, and the same polls that the left jumped on earlier are proving that this strategy is working. 68% of Americans now believe that Social Security is either in crisis or has serious problems. Just 4% subscribe to the Democrats' contention that there is no problem with the program at all.
As the numbers above bear out, the first phase of the White House's strategy has proven successful, as a vast majority of the American public believe that Social Security has problems and something needs to be done. Now comes the second part of the strategy, with the president in the midst of a sixty-day tour designed to amp up support for PSA's. The president is very strong on the stump, and you can expect the level of support to slowly but surely rise.
In what has become a frequent comedy of errors, the American left has been caught once again counting their eggs before they have hatched.
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