Today’s Primary

UPDATE: In a Wall Street Journal story earlier this week, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said that as president, he would "seek to implement private [Social Security] savings accounts...along the lines that President Bush proposed.” More at Campaign For America's Future.]

Item: Crabby Old Lady has heard hardly a word about Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain for the past week. Instead, the anchors and pundits and columnists and prognosticators have traded shots on whether Senator Hillary Clinton should drop out of the Democratic primary if she does not win both Ohio and Texas today.

Or, whether she should drop out if she wins only one. Or if she wins both, but by slim margins. Or – well, Crabby can’t remember the other options now, but all have been presented as being “for the good of the party” and there’s damned little commentary on what the good of the country might be. It’s all horse race and no substance.

Item: For the entire year of 2005, Crabby spent a great deal of time researching Social Security and reporting (through 24 posts) all the reasons she and others she quoted believed that President Bush’s Social Security privatization proposal was a bad idea.

The president wanted to allow workers to invest two percent or four percent or more of their Social Security contributions in stocks which, according to Mr. Bush, would make everyone millionaires by the time they retired. It was as though the president and his Social Security plan supporters had never heard of recession.

Apparently, a large majority of the country HAD heard of recession and the proposal never made it Congress. Crabby doesn’t like being an old I-told-you-so, but here we are in 2008, with the stock market dropping daily like temperatures in a Maine winter.

Item: In 2006, President Bush tried to resurrect his Social Security privatization plan. It lasted about one news cycle and disappeared, but Crabby made note of one report suggesting that the plan might succeed if Senator Clinton were to be elected president:

“[Senator Clinton’s] husband was considering pushing for legislation that would have put 2 percentage points of payroll taxes into a private account system, [economist Dean] Baker says. But his affair with an intern blocked any decision.”

The Christian Science Monitor, 8 May 2006

[Crabby cannot link to the newspaper’s story; it is now behind a firewall.]

There are four things to know about the idea that Senator Clinton, as president, might try to privatize Social Security:

1. She doesn’t necessarily agree with her husband on all policies


2. Senator Barack Obama (and Senator Clinton), as far as Crabby knows, hasn’t said anything about Social Security privatization during this campaign


3. Campaign rhetoric has little to do with actual practice once a candidate is elected


4. Anything that benefits corporations over citizens (which Social Security privatization would do in the billions of dollars) will be tried one way or another

Elder issues have not been addressed (yet) in this year’s campaign, but Crabby keeps thinking about that Christian Science Monitor story and about how Social Security privatization would impoverish future elders. Even with her four points above, Crabby wouldn’t be disturbed if Senator Clinton drops out of the campaign after today.

[At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Grannymar recalls a terrorist attack from half a century ago at an Irish hotel named La Mon and how the community overcame it.]