Michael Kinsley is a brilliant political commentator, but his tired obsession with being counter-intuitive, which dominated his tenure at The New Republic and has since ruined Slate (see here and here), has again reared its ugly head.
His latest column, which I was alerted to by Bob Somerby, makes the counterintuitive case for Bush's honesty during his press conference:
Above all, Bush was honest and even courageous about Social Security. Social Security is entirely about writing checks: Money goes in, money goes out. As Bush has discovered in the past few months, there are no shadows to hide in while you fiddle with it. The problem is fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees, and there are only two possible solutions: Someone has to pay more in, and/or someone has to take less out.
Bush didn't go from explicitly denying this to explicitly admitting it. But he went from implicitly suggesting that his privatization scheme is a pain-free solution to implicitly endorsing a plan for serious benefit cuts. For a politician, that's an admirable difference.
As Somerby wrote, this is truly defining dishonesty down. See CBPP for the full details. Bush has been so egregiously dishonest for his entire presidency that he admits that privatization isn't a free lunch and the pundits fall all over themselves. What a statesman! How courageous! It's pathetic.
Then Kinsley moves into a Cohenesque call for compromise that is astonishingly incoherent:
As this column has argued to the point of stupefaction, Bush's privatization ideas are a mathematical fraud. There is no way that allowing people to manage part of the money they put into the system can produce a surplus to supplement their benefits or cushion the shock of the necessary cuts. But if privatization is truly voluntary, it can't do much harm. And if that is Bush's price for being out front on a real solution to the real problem, the Democrats should let him have it.
Unless they are complete morons -- always a possibility -- the Democrats could end up in the best of all worlds. They know in their hearts that Social Security has got to change in some unpleasant way. Bush, for whatever reason, is willing to take this on and to take most of the heat. And all he wants in return is the opportunity to try something that will alienate people from the Republican Party for generations to come.
Privatization "can't do much harm"? Even though private accounts would be voluntary, they would do a tremendous amount of harm, draining trillions of dollars in transition costs from the Treasury over the next few decades. And where's the "real solution" to the "real problem" that Bush is proposing? The plan he's offered would cover only half of the Social Security shortfall -- and that's before you consider the strain created by private accounts. Last but not least, it's not at all clear that voters will blame the GOP for private accounts. If both sides go along with the deal, the issue will be muddled by the time their effects become clear.
In short, the result is all too typical -- yet another center-left pundit demeaning himself in a desperate attempt to be counter-intuitive. No one wants to be as predictable as Bob Herbert, but why not just focus on getting it right?
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