So the big story after Rick Perry’s credible performance in last night’s debate is whether his hostile description of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” (and his defiantly peculiar suggestion in his suprisingly interesting and quite radical book Fed Up that states should be able to opt out of Social Security) is a ticking time bomb that will, in time, blow up his campaign—either in the primary or the general election.
The virtue of primaries for those who go through them is that they’re like old-time out-of-town tryouts for Broadway musicals—they reveal early weaknesses that can be corrected on the road before opening night in New York. Granted, just as they don’t go from Boston to New Haven to Broadway any longer, primaries do not take place out of view any longer and candidates therefore have a harder time refining their message.
But they can.
Indeed, they can take primary troubles and turn them into advantages—which is what happened when Barack Obama found himself having to deal with his association with Jeremiah Wright. In the end, he was aided immeasurably by the fact that the controversy emerged before the general election—and by his own slippery speech on the subject of race in Philadelphia, in which he simultaneously distanced himself from Wright but did not disown him. Obviously, the same was true for Bill Clinton, whose adultery was revealed just before the 1992 New Hampshire primary. Imagine if it had come out the way that, say, George W. Bush’s DUI arrest came out a week before the general election.
Rick Perry won’t have the benefit of a compliant media, as Obama and Clinton did. But he is lucky that this debate, which is very early, exposed a weakness that he can turn into a strength. As Rich Lowry pointed out, Perry’s statements last night reflected a softening of his position as expressed in his book and he can redirect the discussion still further into an area that will be discussed ad nauseam during the 2012 campaign—the future of entitlements.
Perry’s handling of the question was crude last night, but Perry’s critics are foolish, including Mitt Romney’s team, to imagine that a candidate who says Social Security is unsustainable in its current configuration and that it needs to be changed if today’s 25 year-olds are to receive any kind of benefit has traveled beyond the pale. The president of the United States himself–the very liberal president of the United States—has said the same thing about entitlements in their present form.
If a general-election race ends up with Barack Obama defending the government status quo because he thinks he can best Perry using Social Security while Perry charts a course to a more sustainable future, that’s a fight Republicans should welcome not only conceptually, but also electorally.
