Josh Marshall watches John McCain talk about Social Security with Wolf Blitzer and is astounded:
McCain fabricated an alternative history of the 2005 Social Security battle in order to create a new tax talking points. According to McCain, and he repeated this again and again, “the [Social Security] talks broke down because the Democrats insisted as a precondition that we raise taxes.”
That’s very weird. First, there were no Social Security talks. And the Democrats didn’t make any demands to raise taxes. They didn’t even propose raising taxes. As many of you know, I followed that debate extremely closely. And McCain just made this stuff out of whole cloth. Really bizarre.
Right. What happened was that Bush proposed privatizing Social Security. Democrats said “no.” Then Bush said there was a crisis and we needed to respond by privatizing Social Security. Democrats responded that there was no crisis and privatizing Social Security would be a bad idea. Then Bush called for everyone to get together and reform Social Security in a bipartisan way. Democrats said they were open to holding some bipartisan negotiations about the projected long-run financing of Social Security if Bush would take the concept of privatization off the table. Bush refused, and suddenly, albeit accurately, stopped proclaiming the existence of a crisis. At this point, many Republicans who backed Bush’s privatization effort started pretending they’d done something else.
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