Presidential Rivals Try to Tap Into Social Insecurity

Sen. John F. Kerry on Tuesday accused his rival of launching an “an all-out assault on Social Security” with a plan to privatize the entitlement program that would jeopardize the financial security of senior citizens.

President Bush denied the charge and said his Democratic challenger was fomenting fear, a tactic the Kerry campaign frequently accuses Republicans of using on the subject of terrorism.

As the presidential campaign rolled into its final two weeks, with polls showing the candidates near even, both cast each other as a risk while promising to take the country on a better course.

A day after Bush assailed Kerry as weak in the fight against terrorism, the Massachusetts senator was on the offensive, accusing the president of undermining Social Security during a midday speech in eastern Pennsylvania.

Kerry criticized the president as removing the program’s safety net, saying that Bush had used $509 billion of Social Security payroll contributions -- almost the entire surplus during his administration -- to pay for his tax cuts.

The Democratic candidate said the president’s proposal to allow younger workers to create private retirement accounts would gut the program.

“His four-year spending spree on tax giveaways for millionaires has undermined the hopes of middle-class families and it has put Social Security on a dangerous road,” Kerry told more than 1,000 supporters in a former movie house in Wilkes-Barre, the same venue where Bush had criticized the Massachusetts senator this month.

“Now he’s asking for another four years so he can privatize the program, and undo the social compact with our seniors.”

“No! No! No!” the audience chanted.

To support his charge, Kerry referred to a recent New York Times Magazine article that quoted the president telling donors that he planned to “come out strong” after his reelection with an effort to privatize Social Security.

The Bush campaign has dismissed the account as “made up.”

On Tuesday, the president promised Florida audiences composed heavily of retirees that their Social Security benefits would not change and accused Democrats of reviving an old “scare tactic.”

“In 2000, people traveled this state saying, ‘If George W. gets elected, our seniors will not get their checks,’ ” Bush told several hundred supporters at a community amphitheater in New Port Richey.

“Our seniors must remember, you got your checks. You will continue to get your checks, no matter what they try to tell you.”

Later, during a rally before thousands of seniors at the Villages, a retirement community near Lady Lake, Fla., Bush defended his plan to let younger workers put part of their payroll taxes into their own investment accounts and said Kerry wanted to “maintain the status quo when it comes to Social Security.”

“That is unacceptable for younger Americans,” he said. “I believe a president should solve problems, not pass them on to future generations or future presidents.”

The Bush campaign maintained that the president’s tax cuts did not force the spending of the Social Security surplus, arguing that a federal deficit caused by the bursting of the stock market bubble and an economic slump after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, necessitated the use of those funds.

Social Security remains a beloved program for Americans, and politicians who have suggested changes to its structure have often felt the wrath of voters. In recent days, Kerry has seized on Bush’s reported remarks about privatization as a potent campaign issue, telling audiences in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania throughout the week that the president planned a “January surprise” if he was reelected.

“On Nov. 2, Social Security is on the ballot,” the Democrat said in Wilkes-Barre. “A choice is between one candidate who will save Social Security -- and another who will undermine it.” Though the prospect of cuts to the entitlement program are sure to alarm older voters, Kerry also sought to use the issue to buttress his argument that Bush was an elitist who was indifferent to the pressures facing middle-class Americans.

In his speech, Kerry noted that he had just met with a group of workers from a Pittston glass company who were recently laid off because the company was moving to Japan.

“I cannot tell you how many workers I’ve met like that who are left out there on their own, dangling, the lives of our fellow citizens hanging, while the president and his friends keep feeding the people at the top, keep walking on by, and crossing over to the other side of the street and ignoring those who need the help in America,” Kerry said.

“I’m going to be a champion for the middle class, for the working folks.” He called Social Security “a sacred compact between generations” that guaranteed that “if you work hard and contribute to your country, then you can retire with a level of both decency and dignity.”

“Imagine if that was taken away or put at great risk.” he said. “Imagine if your parents or your grandparents had to work on the factory floor long into their 70s, or even their 80s.... Imagine if people had to sell their house that they grew up in to pay for their food or their medicine, or just because they got sick.

“This is the reckless course on which George Bush has placed this nation,” he concluded. “We have to change it.” The senator promised to strengthen Social Security and cut the federal deficit through fiscal discipline, saying that every budget he would send to Congress would include details about how to pay for each proposal.

He said he would cut “wasteful government spending and bloated government contracts,” pledging to slash at least 100,000 contractors and consolidate departments that had overlapping responsibilities. Kerry said he would ask Congress to grant him the line-item veto, which he said he would use to “slice pork off the federal budget.”

The president, meanwhile, spent the day on a bus tour through Florida from the Gulf Coast to the state’s soggy center, defending his record on a host of domestic issues and lambasting his rival’s tactics.

“Instead of articulating a vision or positive agenda for the future, the senator is relying on a litany of complaints and old-style scare tactics,” Bush said in St. Petersburg.

“With your help on Nov. 2, the people of America will reject the politics of fear, and vote for an agenda of hope and opportunity and security for all Americans.”

At the same time, the president repeated one of his father’s trademark refrains from 1988, accusing Kerry of being a “tax-and-spend” liberal from Massachusetts.

The Kerry campaign, in turn, accused Bush of parroting the kind of “scare campaign” George H. W. Bush ran against then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

“They’re throwing every ounce of bully pulpit that they have available into demonizing John Kerry,” senior advisor Mike McCurry told reporters.

“We do not think that that’s a winning formula in a presidential campaign,” McCurry added. “We think presidents are elected when people see that the future will be different under the stewardship of that candidate that argues most effectively for change.”

Throughout the day, Vice President Dick Cheney said Kerry was using fears about the viability of Social Security to scare voters. He said it was a common Democratic ploy during presidential campaigns.

“He will now try to scare seniors -- and he has this week -- by saying their Social Security is threatened, when he knows the president has guaranteed that those benefits will be there for them, and that we will work to ensure the system for today’s young workers, as well,” Cheney said at a rally at the Green County Fair and Expo Center in Xenia, Ohio.

Later, in Cincinnati, he was asked about Kerry’s remarks during a question-and-answer session with about a dozen people.

“The comments Sen. Kerry made this week were, I thought, outrageous,” Cheney said.

“He knows it’s not true -- that’s the most appalling thing of all.”

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Gold reported from Pennsylvania and Reynolds from Florida.