Social Security viewed as the `third rail’ of American politics

The late Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, who was as partisan as Newt Gingrich and proud of it, used to refer to Social Security as “the third rail” of American politics.

“Touch it and you die,” the Democratic House speaker would warn his Republican colleagues. Among the most-energized sectors of the electorate when their interests are threatened, senior citizens have a well-documented record of turning on any politician said to be tinkering with their life-sustaining benefit checks.

More recently, during the 1996 Maine elections, the AFL-CIO ran an unprecedented yearlong television ad campaign attacking then-1st District Rep. James Longley as a Gingrich clone eager to slash Medicare, the health insurance component of Social Security. Current Democratic incumbent Tom Allen rode to victory on the back of the labor media blitz.

In a bit of irony, Republican challenger Ross Connelly is attacking Allen for “failing to protect” Social Security. Even more interesting, the position taken by Connelly to separate the Social Security Trust fund from the federal government’s operating budget seems uncomfortably similar to one adopted by Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle in 1996 to justify his flip-flop on the Balanced Budget Amendment.

Some background.

In 1992, with Ross Perot on the rampage, Daschle and fellow Democratic Sens. Wendell Ford of Kentucky, Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, Harry Reid of Nevada and Ron Wyden of Oregon promised their constituents they would vote for the balanced budget amendment. So long as Democrats controlled both branches of Congress, there was little risk that the BBA would even get to the floor of either chamber. The 1994 elections that put Republicans in charge of Congress put the Perot-threatened Democrats on the hot seat.

“Using Social Security trust funds to balance the budget is fundamentally dishonest because it masks the true size of the deficit,” said Daschle. He and the other BBA turncoat Democrats signed a pledge to “protect” Social Security by taking it “off-budget.” Their ploy defeated the BBA.

Back then, nobody imagined that federal revenues would generate a budget surplus of $70 billion in just two years without a constitutional amendment, or much in the way of spending cuts. The surplus, unfortunately, is a great illusion. Virtually all of it comes from excess FICA revenues paid in by this generation of workers to cover Social Security benefits paid to current retirees. In about 30 years, when the baby boom generation retires, there will be far less workers paying into FICA which could mean benefit cuts. When Republicans pushed for tax cuts, President Clinton insisted that the projected $1.7 trillion FICA-generated surplus over the next decade must be set aside to “protect” future Social Security retirees.

However, a compromise $520 billion spending bill signed by GOP leaders and President Clinton shut the door on GOP tax cuts but included about $20 billion of new spending. Allen and Rep. John Baldacci voted for the budget bill. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins opposed it.

At a candidate’s forum in Portland Monday, sponsored by the Maine Entrepreneurs Association, Connelly displayed a Daschle-type written pledge that he would vote against any federal budget that does not separate the Social Security Trust Fund from other government expenditures.

“This is the defining issue of the campaign, and of the next decade,” said Connelly.

Allen said it is “false” to charge that he or anybody else “raided” the Social Security Trust Fund because that distinction is irrelevant to the issue of restructuring the program to deal with boomer generation retirees.

“There have been times,” Allen conceded, when both Democrats and Republicans have gotten kind of carried away with charges about abusing Social Security.”

The third 1st District candidate, Eric Grenier of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, was a bemused observer. Grenier wants to scrap Social Security and replace it with a private system similar to 401K tax-sheltered investment savings accounts offered by many companies. Chile and the Great Britain have been quite successful with that type of retirement program.

“Ross is right. Tom Allen voted to spend down the (FICA) surplus, but he has done a very effective job of defending that vote,” said Grenier.

There are some hints that Connelly has closed the 29-percentage-point September polling gap between himself and Allen, but with only a week to go and little evidence that voters are paying much attention to the Clinton scandal or other issues, the GOP challenger’s attempt to electrocute Tom Allen on the “third rail” of American politics is a long shot made more difficult by the fact that Grenier will make some inroads among conservative voters.

John S. Day is a columnist for the Bangor News who is based in Washington, D.C. His e-mail address is zanadume@aol.com.