Fl. GOP Sweats Over Social Security
By Alexander Burns
ORLANDO –Florida Republicans want the GOP presidential field to tread lightly on the subjects of Social Security and Medicare. Very, very lightly.
Even in senior-heavy Florida, there is a willingness this cycle to talk about finally reforming entitlement programs. But there are also growing worries about the way that debate is taking shape in the 2012 elections–and fears it could have devastating consequences for Republicans in a battleground state where roughly one in five residents are over age 65.
More than the state’s 29 electoral votes are at stake: There’s also a U.S. Senate seat and a handful of House districts that could determine the balance of power at every level of Washington.
“There is a way to talk about Social Security reform without scaring seniors and while demonstrating to younger workers that you’re going to have a modern system that’s going to be there for them,” said Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam. “We haven’t heard it yet.”
Putnam, a former Republican congressman, expressed concern about Rick Perry’s criticism about the creation of Social Security in his book. He also mentioned Florida straw poll winner Herman Cain’s repeated references to switching over to the “Chilean model” of entitlement programs.
“Claiming that Social Security is unconstitutional is a way bigger problem than saying it’s a Ponzi scheme,” Putnam said. “And I don’t think the average American aspires to the Chilean standard of living.”
So far, the 2012 entitlements fight has largely been a contest between Perry and Mitt Romney, the two Republican frontrunners who have both endorsed overhauling Social Security and Medicare – in Perry’s case, with some inflammatory language.
But whoever emerges as the GOP nominee, Democrats have indicated they plan to make Social Security a central theme of the 2012 race, a prospect that makes Republicans uneasy given the combustible properties of the issue.
Former Florida Sen. George LeMieux, who’s challenging Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson in 2012, agreed with Putnam that Republicans need to be “very careful to talk about things that people rely on, things that people paid into, in ways that are reassuring.”
A Quinnipiac University poll released last week put in sharp terms the political challenge that would-be entitlement reformers face in Florida.
Two-thirds of voters – including 73 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans – said they were against reducing benefits for future retirees. Fifty-two percent opposed raising the retirement age. Fifty-eight percent disagreed with the statement that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
In another cycle, the GOP might seek to avoid the twin issues of Social Security and Medicare entirely, and opt to focus entirely on attacking Obama for the weak economy.
But that approach leaves many Republicans cold. The GOP has redefined itself since the 2008 campaign as the party of austere fiscal conservatism. Even establishment solons such as Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels have called on the candidates to speak plainly about the fiscal crisis facing the popular federal entitlements.
The trouble for Republicans – in Florida and across the country – is that the more specific they get on addressing entitlement programs, the bigger a target they give Democrats to shoot at.
It was only last May that Democrats seized a conservative House district in upstate New York by campaigning against House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposed changes to Medicare.
Ahead of the GOP primary debate last Thursday in Orlando, the Democratic National Committee released a memo signaling that Social Security would be a central part of the case against either of the president’s leading challengers.
“When it comes to their plans for Social Security and Medicare … Romney and Perry are equally wrong,” wrote DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida congresswoman. “They both seek to eliminate Social Security as it currently exists, threatening to dismantle it entirely or gamble with the program’s funds in the stock market.”
Wasserman Schultz circled back to the Ryan budget, too, pointing out that Romney and Perry “have also both expressed their support for the Republican budget plan which passed the House that would end Medicare as we know it.”
Some Florida Democrats caution that the national party shouldn’t assume Social Security and Medicare will amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card for Democrats seeking to campaign in a prolonged economic downturn. The Florida economy has been hit particularly hard, with an unemployment rate of nearly 11 percent in August.
And voters here have already shown they may be willing to overlook offenses against the entitlement system: In 2010, they narrowly elected a governor, Rick Scott, who whose former company had been implicated in massive Medicare fraud. Scott’s jobs-oriented campaign slogan was, “Let’s Get to Work.”
“I don’t think there’s another issue, at least for people in central Florida,” said Buddy Dyer, Orlando’s Democratic mayor, acknowledging that senior-heavy parts of the state – such as Palm Beach and Broward County – wouldn’t “think warmly of a candidate who’s thinking about” cutting back entitlements.
Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham agreed that the economy is “the bull’s-eye of Florida politics and the president needs to treat it as the bull’s-eye.”
But Graham suggested that the economic slump could heighten voters’ alarm at the prospect of changing entitlement programs that many rely on for financial support.
“The current beneficiaries haven’t been very much seduced by the idea that, ‘We won’t make any changes that affect you,’” Graham said. “If they feel less secure or if they in fact have less buying power, that will have an effect on Florida more than most states.”
So far, the set of issues of surrounding Social Security hasn’t been the subject of substantive debate.
Romney has accused Perry of wanting to “kill” Social Security because he questioned the constitutionality of the program. The Texas governor has shot back that Romney himself compared the financial management of Social Security to a criminal enterprise.
Neither candidate has articulated a plan to bring the two programs into solvency. Nor, for that matter, has President Obama.
The president has, however, protected his position as the candidate best able to cast himself as a defender of entitlement programs, omitting from his recent deficit-cutting proposal any large-scale changes to Social Security and Medicare.
Adam Hasner, a former Florida House majority leader who is also challenging Nelson, said neither of his party’s top presidential candidates had struck the right chord on entitlements – or offered the kind of policy solutions that would give voters faith in the GOP.
“They’re both right and they’re both wrong,” Hasner said of Perry and Romney. “Can you get people’s attention to show them that something’s wrong by calling [Social Security] a Ponzi scheme? Yes, but then you have to share with them what your answers are.”
Of the Democrats’ approach to Social Security, Hasner said: “They may think it’s a silver bullet to win an election. We’re trying to save the country.”
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