The evidence mounts.
As you know by now, New 
Jersey senate candidate Tom Kean, Jr. refuses to say whether he’s for the Bush plan to phase out Social Security and replace it with private accounts. We’re now on Day 8 trying to get a straight answer out of him.
And now we’ve found a second reporter whom Kean told back in 2000 that he supported the Bush plan. That was when Kean was running for a House seat in 2000. (The first was a reporter for the Westfield Leader, noted here.)
According to a May 15th 2000 Associated Press article by Laurence Arnold, Kean said that he, like the other four candidates for the GOP nomination supported “the idea of letting people invest part of their Social Security payroll taxes into a private investment account they would manage.”
In other words, in 2000 Kean supported President Bush’s partial phase-out plan.
One of our spies on the ground in New Jersey tells us that Kean’s got his own Garden state version of the Bush bubble and isn’t making appearances before non-stacked audiences (if folks in state have more details on this, let us know.) So it may be hard for TPM Readers to get a chance to ask Kean whether he still supports the Bush plan. But he’s got to come out of hiding at some point.
