Many principles and lessons from military history are readily applicable to the political world. And one that is particularly applicable is that few maneuvers are more difficult to execute than an organized and orderly retreat under hostile fire.
Without a good discipline, a good plan and good morale, it can degenerate quickly into a rout and a slaughter.
Which brings us to the question of Social Security. An orderly retreat is what the White House and its congressional allies are trying to do.
I get asked a lot just what the White House is thinking. Every day, it seems, they get more bad news on the Social Security front. So just what do they think is going to happen?
I wondered about this myself a lot. And I can’t say that I really have a good answer. But I have a tentative one. And perhaps that will do since I don’t think the White House has more than a tentative answer either.
Basically, what I think is happening is that the White House is trying to keep up the Bamboozlepalooza thing long enough and monotonously enough that eventually people start forgetting that this was supposed to be a specifc piece of legislation the president the president was going to push through Congress this year, even this spring.
After a while it starts to sound a bit more like background noise. And suddenly it’s more like some vague public education campaign with no specific or immediate goal in mind, like President Clinton’s ill-fated ‘conversation about race’.
Basically, having thrown down the gauntlet, President Bush is trying to wriggle out of the challenge so that he can get out of admitting to an abject political defeat.
Do that, they figure, and give the tremulous folks in Congress marching orders to keep their comments vague. Then you can either wait and see if other possibilities develop or just let the whole thing die and hope no one remembers how it all started.
