For those of you who remember President Bush’s 2005 crusade to phase out Social Security by privatizing the program and converting it into a system of private investment accounts, you know that one of the biggest lines of bamboozlement was the White House’s attempt to take the word for Social Security privatization — i.e., ‘privatization’ — and pretend that it was a word Democrats had come up with and one that was unfair for any members of the press to use.
Needless to say, not only is ‘privatization’ an accurate description of the policy but it’s also the one Republicans came up with and the one they used until polls showed definitively that the American people want to preserve Social Security and weren’t for privatizing it. So ‘privatization’ was consigned to the memory hole and Republican spinmeisters tried to find as many ignorant or gullible journalists as they could to allow them to keep changing the name of their policy in order to trick the public into accepting a policy they didn’t like.
After they dropped ‘privatization’ they called it ‘private accounts’. And when ‘private accounts’ tanked too, they said that ‘private accounts’ wasn’t fair either. They were really ‘personal accounts.’ The whole thing just got silly and sad.
It didn’t work in 2005. But now McCain — he of the straight talk — is trotting it out again.
This video is from a townhall meeting in New Jersey just this morning …
