But Ornstein says the president can win back Republican apostates and even sway Democrats by incorporating the best of past Social Security proposals. Those include eliminating the wage cap on payroll taxes, reducing benefits for wealthy people, and creating private accounts as an add-on to Social Security, as outlined by Gene Sperling, Bill Clinton's economic advisor. Another politically easy move would be to institute a program known as KidSave, which would give every child born in America an investment account seeded with a loan of $2,000.

Not all Republicans agree that the president should adopt more centrist Social Security policies; some say that he should move in the other direction, calling for a plan that privatizes Social Security faster, which they say would be an easier sell than the plan Bush has adopted so far. Rick Tyler, an aide to former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a fierce advocate of private accounts, says the White House should call for even bigger private accounts than the ones Bush has proposed. In his State of the Union speech, Bush said he wants to allow workers to divert a third of their Social Security money into the stock market. Tyler says that half of payroll taxes should be eligible for private accounts, as larger accounts would grow faster in the market, and that the extra money would reduce the need for benefit cuts. As Tyler sees it, Bush should pledge that his plan will not cut traditional Social Security benefits. "I've had access to enough members [of Congress] to know that they're not going to want to run for reelection after having voted for a benefit cut," Tyler says.

To say the least, economists are skeptical that the long-term solvency of the Social Security system can be guaranteed by allowing workers to invest a great deal of their money in private accounts. Such large accounts would create much larger transitional costs than the ones Bush has outlined, and it's hard to see how Bush would sell lawmakers on this kind of plan. But Tyler says it can be done. Bigger private investments, he says, will ultimately lead to enormous long-term gains. And the president will make or break his plan on the strength of selling those gains to Americans. "With the president's help, I think we can get it done," Tyler says. "This is really a communications challenge -- it's not an economic challenge, it's a political challenge."

But what does the White House want from this political fight? It's not clear. Is Bush an ideologue who will support only the plan advocated by the extreme right, the groups who don't want to compromise? Or is he a tactician who wants to chalk up a win, any win, on Social Security, even if he has to abandon his principles and compromise with some centrist Democrats to do it?

Evidence so far suggests that he won't compromise. But Ornstein says he could change his mind, because the payoffs to compromise might be sweeping. By abandoning his plan to carve out private accounts from Social Security taxes, Bush could plausibly pull together a coalition of Republicans and Democrats to institute a series of realistic, moderate reforms to return Social Security to solvency. If he did so, he could claim to have "saved Social Security" -- certainly the kind of thing that gets you into the history books.

Compared to the opposition he faces for his current plan, opposition to such a centrist plan may indeed be slight. John Rother, director of policy and strategy for the political powerhouse AARP, says that if Bush pressed ahead with real reforms to the system, AARP -- which supported his Medicare bill but which is spending considerable resources fighting private accounts -- wouldn't oppose him.

Of course, a number of Democrats could try to block any version of the plan, arguing that any Social Security legislation passed by Bush, even a relatively good bill, would hurt Democrats. But if Bush endorsed centrist ideas on Social Security, the Democratic unity would shatter, Ornstein says. And Ornstein believes the White House is nimble enough to refocus its efforts to cash in on a fruitful plan -- after all, that's what the Bush White House does when it meets resistance. Bush was against the 9/11 Commission before he was for it. The president criticized the McCain-Feingold bill before he signed it. And remember Bush's sudden decision, in the spring before the 2002 midterm election, to co-opt Democrats' plan to create the Department of Homeland Security? And we remember how well that election went for the Democrats.

But can Republicans really embrace a plan different from the one the president crowed about at his State of the Union and not look foolish or desperate? Ornstein says the Republicans are adept at doing that too. "When the White House puts a message out about where they're going, they don't need a phone tree to have all of their acolytes -- from the Wall Street Journal to Drudge to Fox News -- repeat it ad infinitum and have the base fall in line," he says. If Bush suddenly began to compromise, Democrats would claim a small immediate victory for having changed the president's thinking. But in the end, he'd take the credit for taking on the third rail of politics.

It's an interesting situation. When it comes to Social Security, Democrats had better hope Bush remains as inflexible and incompetent as he's been so far. Otherwise they'll be in trouble.

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