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Vapid Response Team
By Charlie Cook
Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2005
It's difficult to say which was more frustrating last Wednesday, watching the president's State of the Union address or the Democratic "response."
While President Bush's speech was well crafted and well delivered, it begged so many questions that I suspect I wasn't the only one talking to the television set during the speech.
But the Democrats failed to ask any of those questions.
That the word "response" is in quotation marks is no accident, because what Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., delivered on national television was not a response at all. They were merely speeches that were written and rehearsed in advance. In fact, if the networks allowed such things, Reid and Pelosi could have taped their remarks a week or so in advance. It's ironic that the Democratic Party is taking so many hits for being the party of the trial lawyers yet seems unable to make a convincing case of its own.
In an effort to come across as smooth and polished, Democrats have abandoned any sort of effort to act as rebutters of the president's arguments.
Instead, they have taken to delivering alternative, mini-State of the Union speeches. And just like last year's Democratic National Convention in Boston, this year's Democratic "response" proved to be another wasted opportunity for the party.
The heart and soul of the president's State of the Union speech was the section on Social Security, an issue that will clearly define the early part of his second term.
While one can easily make a semantic argument over whether there is a Social Security crisis, or whether it is a serious problem that will eventually qualify as a crisis, the president did a reasonably good job of making his case.
Yet if the president's statement that Social Security will run out of money in 2042 is correct, why isn't Medicare more of a crisis, since it will run out of funding in 2019? If Medicare is slated to go broke 23 years before Social Security, why didn't it merit attention in Bush's speech? Unfortunately, Reid and Pelosi did not make this argument in their "response."
When the president made his case for personal accounts, he accurately pointed out that payroll taxes paid today are funding retirement benefits for seniors tomorrow and not put in some gigantic trust fund until the current workers retire.
If that's the case, then wouldn't allowing up to a third of workers' payroll taxes to be diverted -- "carved out" in the term of the moment -- simply hasten the financial demise of the Social Security system? If Reid or Pelosi made that case Wednesday night, it didn't come across very well.
And, the Bush administration has floated the notion of changing the way Social Security benefits are determined by basing future indexing on the rise in prices as opposed to the increase in wages.
According to a Wall Street Journal article published Friday, such a change would mean today's teenagers retiring at age 65 would see a 32.5 percent reduction in benefits over current retirees. For not-yet-born Americans retiring in 2075, that cut would amount to 45.9 percent.
The same article pointed out that the current system replaces 36 percent of the average 65 year-old retiree's previous earnings, but that it would drop to 25 percent in 2052 and 20 percent for those retiring in 2075 if the indexing system is changed.
That's a cut in anyone's vocabulary, and yet that message did that come through in the Democratic response.
It's true Americans find the concept of private accounts (Republicans prefer to call them "personal" accounts) attractive and they give workers some control over their savings for retirement.
But it is equally clear from the polling data that as soon as the words "stock market" and the concept of risk are raised, support starts to melt like an ice cube on an August day in Washington.
The president's plan calls for the use of "life cycle" funds for those investing in the stock market to reduce risk as people begin to approach retirement age.
But what if the stock market goes into one of its periodic downturns before the risk level has been significantly reduced? Unfortunately, Democrats did not communicate these risks very effectively Wednesday night.
Rebuttals to State of the Union speeches are supposed to be effective, not polished.
They are supposed to poke holes in a president's speech, not attempt to match its rhetorical flourish for rhetorical flourish or prove that the opposition party possesses better TelePrompTer reading skills.
Such rebuttals are simply supposed to convince people the opposition leaders are good, old-fashioned, down-home folks who can lay the same claim as the president to understanding the concerns of average Americans.
If congressional Democrats learned anything from the Kerry-Edwards 2004 campaign experience, it wasn't on display Wednesday evening.
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