Obama Deprives Biden of Social Security Attack

“But — but I want to talk about the values behind Social Security and Medicare,” President Obama announced during last week’s presidential debate, before trying to draw a contrast between his and Mitt Romney’s plans for those entitlement programs.

The problem with the president’s statement was that, mere seconds before, he had cautioned that “I suspect that on Social Security, we've got a somewhat similar position.” Both he and Romney believe the program needs to be “tweaked.”

How much of a difference in values does a “similar” stance on the issues reveal?

That’s the question many progressives were wondering after the debate. Obama’s Social Security comments, for them, represented a significant missed opportunity.

Romney’s own stance on Social Security isn’t particularly noteworthy, but his runningmate’s is. Paul Ryan was the House sponsor, with Senator John Sununu (the son of Romney’s campaign co-chairman), of a reform bill that would have given Social Security recipients the option to direct some of their Social Security contributions into private investment accounts. The Social Security reform bill President Bush pushed in 2005 was a more moderate version of the Ryan-Sununu plan. Of course, Bush’s attempt to overhaul Social Security was widely portrayed by the left as an effort to destroy Social Security. The Ryan-Sununu plan also was the inspiration for the Social Security plank of Paul Ryan’s original Roadmap budget proposal.

Obama missed a chance to pick up this line of attack by tying Romney to Ryan’s Social Security record. Remember, Obama has already supported “tweaking” Social Security while in office. It would have helped him to portray the GOP ticket as wanting not only tweaks, but a drastic overhaul.

Vice President Biden doesn’t normally shy away from making the much stronger case against the GOP. In August, he promised that Obama wouldn’t make any changes to Social Security (despite Obama’s previous openness to such changes). More recently, he’s suggested that Romney and Ryan want to raise taxes on Social Security benefits to cut taxes for the wealthy. In general, he’s the bad cop of the team, willing to make attacks that Obama himself wouldn’t attempt.

But on at least the issue of Social Security, Obama has taken the gun out of Biden’s hand just before Biden’s best opportunity to associate Romney with his runningmate’s conservative congressional record, namely tomorrow’s vice-presidential debate.

Politico reports that the Obama campaign wants Biden to make the Social Security attack he didn't. But Biden will have a tough time arguing that the GOP ticket’s plans for Social Security reveals a deeper heartlessness given that Obama has already said the two campaigns have similar positions.