Saving private accounts Or

Saving private accounts?

Or Saving Private W.?

Just, why is Karen Hughes coming back to the White House?

In his piece breaking the story today, Peter Baker notes sources who “said Hughes will not be a formal member of the White House staff but will take on a specific and particularly important assignment involving international affairs, but they would not identify it.”

Color me skeptical.

Notwithstanding her communications assignment post-9/11, Hughes isn’t a foreign affairs person. She’s a politics and communications person. And a good one. Indeed, one who’s always been in tension, if a collegial and productive one, with Karl Rove, as Dan Froomkin does a nice job explaining today.

And where does the president seem to need help right now? On the international front or the domestic politics front?

Right.

A new poll just out again puts the president’s public approval on Social Security below 40%. This time 37% according to AP/IPSOS. The poll also shows that rather than cementing a new Republican governing majority, as Karl Rove has long argued for and planned, Social Security has split the current tenuous Republican majority right down the middle. The AP poll shows that the president is having problems with “independents, married women and Southerners.”