War on Words Shapes Debate
Semantics Is Key To Social Security
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
As the two parties brace for the coming debate over restructuring Social
Security, polls and focus groups for both sides have shown that voters --
especially older ones, who vote in disproportionately heavy numbers -- distrust
any change that has the word "private" attached to it.
The White House has a logical idea: Don't use the word. This is difficult
because, after all, they would be "private" accounts, and Bush's plan
would "partially privatize" Social Security.
So Bush and his supporters have started using "personal accounts"
instead of "private accounts" to refer to his plan to let younger
workers invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds. Republican
officials have begun calling journalists to complain about references to
"private accounts," even though Bush called them that three times in
a speech last fall.
"Semantics are very important," House Ways and Means Committee
Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) said last week when a reporter asked about
"private" accounts. "They're personal accounts, not private
accounts. No one is advocating privatizing Social Security."
"Don't dismiss the use of a word," Thomas added. "The use of
a word is critical in making law."
Democrats have their own linguistic problem: They want to banish the term
"crisis." Democratic Party leaders are urging members to discuss
future Social Security shortfalls as a "challenge" rather than a
crisis, and assert that Bush is trying to manufacture a crisis to justify
making changes that many Democrats say are unnecessary. The White House has
fired back with a transcript showing that President Bill Clinton, during a
Republican officials also circulated a quote from the late Sen. Daniel
Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), chairman of a Bush-appointed commission on Social
Security, who in 2000 called privatization "a scare word."
The battle over the vocabulary of restructuring Social Security is the
latest example of the lengths to which politicians and their consultants go to
test and refine wording in an era when so many voters are influenced by the
sound bites in television newscasts. Both sides have commissioned expensive research
to guide their word choice as they prepare their cases.
The president's plan would allow younger Americans to divert a third or more
of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts to enhance their
long-term benefits.
Pollsters on both sides of the Social Security debate said they believe that
semantics could be destiny, given the skittishness of lawmakers and voters
about changing the popular system, which will turn 70 on Aug.14.
Michael D. Tanner, director of the Social Security project at the
libertarian Cato Institute, said "the term 'privatization' always polls
about 20 points lower than a description of it." "The problem is that
there is no good term," Tanner said. "People have tried
'modernization' and 'personalization.' They all sink like a rock."
Reflecting the new premium being placed on language, Bush turned prickly a
week ago Friday during an interview with The Washington Post aboard Air Force
One when he was asked if he would talk to Senate Democrats about his
"privatization plan."
"You mean the personal savings accounts?" the president scolded.
"We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions."
Bush generally refers to "personal accounts" but said during a
September speech to a Republican fundraiser in Washington that he wanted to
offer younger workers "a private account that they can call their own, a
private account they can pass on to the next generation, and a private account
that government can't take away."
Republican officials began warning their congressional candidates against
using any form of the word "private" in 2002, when Democrats seized
on it to argue that the addition of individual investment accounts to Social
Security would jeopardize the nation's safety net.
Republicans have not always resisted the term. Cato, an early champion of
adding individually controlled accounts to Social Security, started a policy
incubator called the "Project on Social Security Privatization" in
1995. Following complaints from Republican leaders, the name was quietly changed
in 2002 to the "Project on Social Security Choice."
The other area undergoing a semantic makeover is the financial threat to the
system. Bush said in his news conference before Christmas that "the crisis
is here," and asserted in a recent radio address that the system is
"on the road to bankruptcy." Although it will be at least a decade
before the Social Security system begins to pay out more in benefits than it
collects in payroll taxes, Vice President Cheney recently asserted that the
system "is on a course to eventual bankruptcy," while White House
budget director Joshua B. Bolten said the situation "is a crisis."
Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, said such terminology is important,
because "to develop support for major social change, the status quo has to
be scarier than the change."
McInturff said the power of language in shaping public opinion on the
question can be seen in polls he conducted last year. A majority of respondents
said they wanted to keep the system basically the same when asked about
allowing "people to invest some of their Social Security taxes in private
accounts." But a majority favored change when he added the phrase
"like IRAs or 401(k)s."
"It's important that the change be connected back to something
familiar," he said.
Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, said any form of the word
"private" suggests "a radical change to Social Security."
"People have seen lots of risks and rip-offs occur, and the virtue of
Social Security is that it has been a . . . very reliable system for a very
long time," Garin said.
So, according to Garin, Democrats will "do everything they can to force
Republicans to live with the language of privatization."
"The debate will be a test of wills over what we call this thing,"
he said.
© 2005 Washingtonpost.Newsweek
Interactive