ROGER SIMON COLUMN
OCTOBER 24, 2005
When, if ever, George Bush gets to wondering when the bottom fell out of his presidency, he need look no further than his attempt to reform Social Security.
Privatizing Social Security was going to be the jewel in the crown of Bush's second term. It, and not the quagmire of Iraq, would be his legacy to the nation. It would be what historians would remember him for.
By revamping the most popular federal program in American history, he would put an end to the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and pound the final nail in the coffin of Big Government.
But Bush couldn't sell it. He could not sell his claim that Social Security was in imminent danger. He could not sell the notion that his plan would save it.
We had heard that imminent danger argument before. The nation was in imminent danger from Saddam Hussein, and his weapons of mass destruction and the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the only thing that could save us.
When it sunk in to the public at large that the excuse for the Iraq war was untrue, the "political capital" that Bush bragged about possessing after his reelection disappeared.
In attempting to sell the Social Security plan, his spinmasters used their ace-in-the-hole, their ultimate weapon: a nationwide speaking tour by the president himself. The president's face and voice would fill TV screens night after night preaching the need for this reform, even threatening that without it, taxes would have to go up.
Nobody bought it. The privatization plan simply had no constituency - - not with seniors, not with Baby Boomers, not with the young, not with academics, not with Congress.
Its only backers were the tiny group of conservatives who flutter around Bush like moths around a flame. They had told Bush that he could sell his plan to the nation, because he had the charm, the political savvy and the public support to sell anything.
But he didn't. Neither the public nor the Congress was going to allow itself to be "Iraqified" a second time.
Enter Harriet Miers. The nomination of Harriet Miers comes from the same hubris that Social Security privatization came from. Bush acolytes in the White House took the wrong lesson from the nomination of John Roberts. They decided they were the geniuses and not Roberts.
But with Miers, Bush may have gone a nomination too far. The howls from conservative critics have been vocal. George Will said of George Bush: "He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution."
Which is a fancy way of saying the George Will doesn't think George Bush is too darn bright.
Harriet Miers disagrees. She once told David Frum, a conservative columnist and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, that Bush "was the most brilliant man she had ever met."
I doubt that even Bush's wife, mother or father would make that statement. They certainly might say he is the most decent or the most sincere or the most good-hearted. But the most brilliant man they have ever met?
Either Miers is just another moth around the flame or she really hasn't met that many people.