Saying No to Privatization Isn't About Partisanship

Time magazine's Mark Halperin doesn't like what Barack Obama has to say on Social Security:

In a move as predictable as Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, Democrats are using Social Security scare tactics to gain ground before the November election. President Barack Obama is not only tolerating this classic old politics maneuver by his party — he is leading the charge.

[...]

A bipartisan partnership on Social Security — as on every other tough issue, including Afghanistan, immigration, energy, education, deficit reduction and jobs — is going to require trust: trust between the President and Republican leaders to stand up jointly to the extreme forces in Congress and at the grass roots in both their parties, meet in the center, take some political risks and find creative compromises to get things done. On Social Security, that means Obama will have to support raising the retirement age and cutting some benefits, while Republicans will have to back some increased taxation. And they will have to work together and present a united front.

But let's look at what the President actually had to say:

[Obama] cautioned that "some Republican leaders in Congress don't seem to have learned any lessons" from the past and are "pushing to make privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda if they win a majority in Congress."

See what Halperin has done here? He's conflating President Obama's opposition to privatizing Social Security with a knee-jerked politicization of the program.

What the President is saying here is that he is opposed to raiding the funding mechanism for the Social Security program to pay for private accounts -- a privatization of the program. Do you know who else is opposed to such a risky scheme? A sizable majority of the American people, according to Bloomberg polling from this year (which showed just 33 percent approving of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, with 59 percent disapproving of the proposal).

If anything, it is the Republicans who are politicizing the issue, trying to relitigate their losing 2005 battle to phase out the exceedingly popular program by running a slate of candidates favoring privatization (like Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, Marco Rubio in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and possibly Joe Miller in Alaska, to name a few). The President should be lauded, not criticized, for showing the courage to stand up to this concerted offensive.