How Out There Is Rick Perry On Social Security?

Texas Gov. and GOP frontrunner Rick Perry attends a campaign event in Corona Del Mar, California. September 8, 2011.
Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Social Security is the latest battlefield for the GOP primary, with Mitt Romney launching a new campaign to paint Rick Perry as extreme and out of touch with voters over his myriad criticisms of the program.

“Social Security is a good thing. We need Social Security,” Romney said in an interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday. “If we nominate someone who the Democrats could correctly characterize as being opposed to Social Security, we would be obliterated.”

Given the Tea Party’s zeal for budget cuts, it might be easy to assume that Romney’s strategy is unworkable in a primary. But it’s possible Romney is onto something and Perry has gone too far on a limb even for the GOP base in his attacks on the program.

On a basic level, Perry’s claims that Social Security is in crisis and needs to be changed, perhaps by raising the retirement age, are certainly not that extreme for mainstream GOP officials, despite Romney’s attempts to paint them that way. But Perry takes the critique to a whole new level, claiming that the whole concept of Social Security is a fraud and a lie. Despite efforts by his campaign to soften Perry’s language, Perry has clearly signaled he wants to get rid of Social Security — and that’s what Romney has seized on.

On MSNBC Thursday, RNC chair Reince Priebus dismissed talk that attacking Social Security would leave the Republican nominee weaker against Obama next year.

“I’m going to let all the pundits and the smart people out there voice their opinions,” Priebus told Chuck Todd when asked about Karl Rove’s view that Perry’s Social Security attacks are “toxic” to a Republican nominee. “But what I do think is on safe ground in this country is having a serious, adult conversation about what we’re going to do to finance Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Speaking to reporters at a Christian Science Monitor-sponsored breakfast Wednesday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor also signed on with the concept of making changes to the nation’s entitlement system in the next cycle.

“I think the point that [Perry] is trying to make is, the numbers don’t lie and the math doesn’t add up,” Cantor said. “We’ve got to do something to address it. I agree that we need to focus on the idea that people are expected the government to live up to its promises, and right now the numbers do not lie.”

Nonetheless, Cantor was careful to downplay the “Ponzi scheme” and “monstrous lie” talk, noting that Social Security’s problems “can be addressed probably more straightforwardly than the health care system.” And he’s right: despite Perry’s rhetoric, all it takes is a few relatively minor fixes to make the math on Social Security benefits work indefinitely.

What do the polls show? They show America is not ready to embrace Perry the same way the GOP establishment seems to be. A Pew poll conducted in June found 59% of Americans surveyed rejected the idea of raising the retirement age — one of the ways Perry has suggested to “un-Ponzi” the system. Meanwhile, an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in March showed voters opposed to just about every conceivable change to the program that results in a benefits decrease or an increase in tax. One WSJ/NBC poll this year even showed tea partiers opposed to Social Security benefit cuts by a 2 to 1 margin.

And that’s just the simple tweaks to Social Security’s finances. Pivoting off Perry, his rival candidate Herman Cain, said in Thursday’s debate that the US should follow Chile’s model and privatize the program so retirees could put their money into the market in exchange for giving up the current defined benefits system. A similar plan by President Bush in 2005 went down in flames and brought his poll numbers along for the ride.

Polling by the AARP in 2010 showed voters are still overwhelmingly repelled even by that kind of privatization plan. Some 79% of respondents said they preferred providing guaranteed benefits for Social Security versus only 19% who want to invest in private accounts with higher risks and rewards. And despite advocates’ insistence that younger voters get what they’re talking about, opposition was strong in the survey across all ages.

As for whether Social Security is constitutional or should be delegated to the states, two ideas Perry explored in his book Fed Up!, the notion is so little discussed in either party that there doesn’t seem to be any decent polling.

In Perry’s defense, polls have not always been the best judge of how the public will vote. In Florida — a big state for Social Security — voters overwhelmingly picked the Social Security-criticizing Marco Rubio for Senate over either the Republican-leaning independent Charlie Crist or the Democratic nominee, both of which tried to make Rubio’s stance on entitlements a big issue.

So there’s ample polling evidence that Perry’s positions are out there among even Republican voters. The question now is whether Romney can exploit the issue.

Latest Election 2012
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: