ELLEN GOODMAN GOP faces trouble with Social Security

BOSTON -- Is it too late to put a family trademark on the New Deal? The way things are going, the founding father of Social Security will be an icon for the crowd that wants to unravel it. All that's left is for the Bush administration to change its theme song from "Hail to the Chief" to "Happy Days are Here Again."
First, we had vague and fond references by the 2005 president to his 1930s predecessor. GWB makes FDR sound like a favorite ancestor whose charming-if-dusty old ideas just need a brush-up to "serve the needs of our time."
Next, the conservative group Progress for America actually used FDR footage in an ad to privatize Social Security. This alone was enough to force grandson James Roosevelt into defending the real FDR from the revisionists.
Undaunted conservatives then scrambled the words and meaning of the late, great president to say that FDR himself endorsed "personal accounts." The notion that FDR was a closet privatizer was promoted with a straight face by a Wall Street Journal columnist, then by William Bennett and, not surprisingly, by Fox News' Brit Hume, who isn't one of those journalists on the Bush payroll, he just plays one on TV.
'Inventor society'
Soon, I am sure, Roosevelt will be Photoshopped into the White House portrait next to Bush. Or we'll have a pixelated, colorized FDR, smiling jauntily in the background while the president repeats the words he offered a New Hampshire audience last week: "We're developing an investor society."
Well, I guess you know the plan is in trouble when Republicans start looking for the endorsement of a dead Democrat. And trouble is the operative word. The American people get the point that times have changed. Yes, there were once 16 workers for every retiree and soon the ratio will be two to one. Yes, by 2018 there will be more money going out that coming in. Yes, we live longer and yes, Social Security needs shoring up.
But we also get the point that privatizing Social Security will ratchet up the personal risk and the national debt without doing anything to make the program solvent or to increase national savings. The scheme received only the mildest support from Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan -- and Greenspan is the sort of Wall Street true believer who would have undoubtedly voted against Social Security in 1935.
As for the president, anyone channeling FDR has to start with the word "security." When Roosevelt came into office, elder Americans either worked till they couldn't, or lived on savings, or with family or in the 1,300 penurious old-age homes scattered around the country. The Depression had pulled the rug out from under these shaky supports.
In his first week in the White House, 450,000 Americans wrote letters to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Many of them echoed the sentiments of the distraught daughter who wrote, "I am in no position to do the right thing for mother."
"Security was the touchstone, the single word that summed up more of what Roosevelt aimed at than any other," writes historian David Kennedy. It was not a word taken lightly. "Social security" was not a focus group-tested label but a promise. In FDR's words, it offered a measure of "security against the hazards and vicissitudes of life."
As an insurance plan, Social Security was a moderate alternative to some of the radical grass-roots proposals of the time. But what he did, very consciously was "to employ the active interest of the nation as a whole through government to encourage a greater security for each individual who composes it."
Ideology
Gradually it's become clear that our president's determination to partially privatize Social Security is an inverse image of FDR's plan. It's less a matter of economics than ideology.
So the attempt to hijack Roosevelt and co-opt his approval is not only posthumous, it's preposterous. Do any of FDR's new best friends remember the boast he made in his 1936 State of the Union address: "We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed"?
In the end, the incredible, un-co-optable FDR may be the one Democrat who can beat the Bush White House. If the Republicans can't channel him, the Democrats should. "The test of our progress," said the real FDR, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
That's the New Deal. The rest is just the very, very old deal.
Washington Post Writers Group