It is the best of venues for a brawl about Social Security, and it is the worst of venues to stand up for it.
That’s the conundrum facing the Republican candidates who’ll gather tonight in Tampa, FL to debate once again. A central theme of the televised debate is expected to be Social Security, the popular program Rick Perry loves to hate and many of his competitors are falling all over themselves to defend.
Florida is the logical place to make this stand, for obvious population reasons. But Monday’s debate, co-sponsored by the Tea Party Express and CNN, could also be the best place for Perry stick with the whole “Social Security is a monstrous lie” routine.
It is, after all, the tea party which Perry is most appealing to with his direct attacks on entitlement programs. And the debate sponsors picked the date for their debate to showcase the power the movement has had over the GOP in the past couple years.
“This date was chosen because it is such a significant day in the history of the tea party movement: the anniversary of the massive ‘March on D.C.’ which demonstrated the power and size of the tea party,” Tea Party Express organizers wrote in a statement on their website.
The tea party in the crowd at the debate probably won’t be very interested in Mitt Romney’s new strategy of unequivocally stating Perry is making himself unelectable with his rhetoric on Social Security. Will the Florida audience? Polls have shown they don’t want to see changes to Social Security, but that didn’t stop them from voting for the conservative Sen. Marco Rubio (R), who talked tough about the program in 2010.
Nevertheless, Romney telegraphed all last week that he intends to stick Perry with his words about Social Security and stick him hard. And he won’t be the only one. The debate should be a veritable AARP picnic of kind words about the nation’s public retirement system.
⢠On Sunday, Michelle Bachmann’s campaign told Byron York that Bachmann will be jumping on the anti-Perry dogpile:
“Bernie Madoff deals with Ponzi schemes, not the grandparents of America,” says a Bachmann adviser. “Clearly she feels differently about the value of Social Security than Gov. Perry does. She believes Social Security needs to be saved, that it’s an important safety net for Americans who have paid into it all their lives.”
In a recent interview, Bachmann tried to tie Perry’s words on Social Security to conservative attacks on President Obama during the debt ceiling debate. As default drew closer, Obama warned that Social Security checks might not go out if the debt ceiling was not raised. Bachmann and other tea partiers accused Obama of fearmongering — now she’s throwing that charge Perry’s way.
“I think that it is not good when President Obama, for instance, made the comment — recklessly, in my opinion — that seniors may not get their Social Security checks in August when we were dealing with the debt ceiling debate,” Bachmann told Radio Iowa. “That’s wrong for any candidate to make senior citizens believe that they should be nervous about something they have come to count on. We need not do that.”
⢠Newt Gingrich is also taking swipes at Perry’s Social Security talk on the trail, which might come out again during the debate. “Social security is a fact,” he told a crowd in New Hampshire, according to MSNBC.
At the same time he dings Perry — and this is something to keep in mind about all the Republicans on the debate state, all of whom advocate serious “reforms” to the program — Gingrich is pushing his own plan to eliminate Social Security as we know it. Gingrich called for a plan to give workers below the age of 48 the option to keep the existing plan or opt-in to private accounts.
⢠Former Utah Governor (and former Obama-appointed ambassador to China) Jon Huntsman is turning his tough talk against Mitt Romney. His (long-shot) path to the nomination rests on portraying himself, not Romney, as the real electable moderate. Consequently, his campaign sent reporters an email over the weekend drawing attention to skeptical comments about Social Security in Mitt Romney’s latest book, and slamming his main rival and Rick Perry as “two peas in a pod.”
⢠So, what is Perry to do against all these attacks? Well, for one thing, he’s already strongly suggested his solution for Social Security will be similar to the one Gingrich has described in one crucial way: it won’t do anything to change the benefits for current recipients. In South Carolina a week ago, Perry talked about dramatically increasing the retirement age for workers 45 and younger, while assuring the retirees and those approaching retirement in the crowd that their Social Security wouldn’t be touched.
If Perry can convince the seniors in the Florida audience that he’s not going to change anything for them — while also stoking the fires of the tea partiers in the crowd who lap up his Ponzi Scheme talk with gusto — he may be the only one on stage who walks away from the Tea Party Express debate in Tampa completely intact.
And if not, he gets another change to try in eleven days, when the candidates gather in Orlando to debate before Florida Republicans once again.
