Today CBS News offers race card waving pseudo-analysis, Obama’s Age Gap: Is It Race? The commentary, by Dick Meyer, doesn’t mention Social Security! But you can bet a lot of seniors haven’t trusted Barack on that issue ever since they heard he’d said “everything is on the table.”
Obama’s slip or whatever it was allowed this very effective attack:
“Putting everything on the table is not the right answer, raising the retirement age is not an answer. Cutting benefits is not an answer,” she said. Ms. Clinton’s comments were a swipe at her chief Democratic rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who had said that “everything is on the table” for Social Security except private accounts. But don’t get too excited [says the Washington Post to its inside-the-Beltway consensus, Social Security hating audience]: Mr. Obama has taken care to backtrack from that outburst of boldness, writing in the Quad-City Times that “I do not want to cut benefits or raise the retirement age.”
In other words, yeah, It’s a third rail, stupid! And yeah, ‘analyzing’ why seniors vote for Clinton much more than they vote for Obama without mentioning Social Security is stupid, Dick Meyer!
And yes, well, obviously a person can backtrack as Obama has done, but many of us cynics are trying to figure out what the politicians really have in mind to do post-election. Seniors can be more cynical than most, and they may not trust Obama’s Social Security backtracking words. It’s a problem for him.
Of course, I’ve probably got Clinton wrong and she’ll deform Social Security when (and if) she takes office. Ain’t politics a bee-otch?
More on Obama’s Social Security problem: Paul Krugman commented two months on a different aspect of the problem for Obama, that he decided back then to pretend, like the Republicans do, that there is a ‘Social Security Crisis’ when in fact there isn’t one. Krugman ocmmented:
. . . it’s just incredible that Barack Obama would make obeisance to fashionable but misguided Social Security crisis-mongering a centerpiece of his campaign. It’s a bad omen; it suggests that he is still, despite all that has happened, desperately seeking approval from Beltway insiders.
Substantively, this is wrong — and the tone-deafness is hard to understand.
