A White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, was confronted this week by poll figures revealing George Bush’s declining approval ratings on the Social Security issue.

Mr. Duffy confidently predicted that these figures soon would be reversed as the president builds steam in his plan to educate the public.

Excited by this prospect, I scanned the compiled releases from the White House press office for the past few weeks. Like several other students of the president’s tutorial prowess, I found a transcript of remarks he made in Tampa, Florida, in February to an audience of boosters. This was part of his first national tour to rally support for his vision of a Social Security of the future. The president earlier had pictured himself as a kind of 21st Century reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Roosevelt as the founder of Social Security as we know it, George W. Bush as its savior.

The president, as you know, is in the midst of a relentless crusade to rescue the American public from the pits of ignorance in the Social Security debate.

Here is Mr. Bush defining the issues in remarks that appear in the verbatim government transcript for February 4 in Florida. It gives us a fresh new portrait of the cool and disciplined mind of the chief executive asserting his grasp of the country’s economics:

“Because the—all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts—the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be, or closer delivered to, what has been promised.

“Does that make sense to you? It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the—like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate—the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those—if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.”

The White House spokesman explained this week that more and more people are coming around to the president’s point of view.

That is supernaturally scary.

Which point?

Which view?

If he is correct, may God save all of the baffled motorists in America who now will be driving behind bumper stickers announcing the new rallying cry of the super SUV owners: SUPPORT BUSH: HELP ON THE RED!

The country has acquired a sort of stupefied tolerance of Dubya’s odd adventures in the English language. This is a defensive response, something like the rabbits’ hair turning white in the winter. Moreover, when he’s on the stump the guy has a stake in coming over as Plain George, pal of the people, teaching them what his handlers call “appropriate” political ideas, coming to you from the friendly professor in cowboy boots.

It sells to a lot of people. So does the organized defamation of war heroes in election campaigns, followed by prayer breakfasts. With this crowd, there is no guiding standard of political honesty. Laughing at his own mangled English gets to be part of Bush’s appeal to people who don’t mind being deceived, because it is after all “our guy” who’s doing the peddling.

But those “appropriate” political and fiscal ideas he’s fronting include stripping the political landscape in America of all meaningful resistance.

It means packing the federal courts with right wing lifetime appointees so odorous and dangerous to traditional human and civil rights in America that the Bush government is now seriously considering destroying the filibuster as a minority tool to defend its ground.

It means tightening the bankruptcy laws to appease the credit card industry, which got rich inviting gullible people to spend wildly and wants now to wring every available dime out of them until they go into begging or burglary. And if the customers lose their jobs to corporate consolidation or lose their pensions because they have no more negotiating power, tough. What should console them is that other and wealthier Americans, with a longer reach when they get into money troubles, can put their assets into a bank in the Caribbean. And their friends in Congress will say they never heard of those assets.

The accumulation of power began with the theft of the presidential election in 2000. It now has reached a level unprecedented in America history. It has created a partnership between the government and corporate power that has intimidated all but a handful of American newspapers and all of the American mainstream broadcast media. It has turned the once strong and dignified CNN into a nervous and embarrassing copy of the Republican propaganda agency of cable television, Fox News.

The loudly trumpeted social triumphs of prescription drugs for seniors in 2006 and the “No Child Left Behind” education law are turning out to be frauds. The Bush government lied about the cost of the Medicaid bill, now $700 billion instead of the advertised $400 billion and made it impossible for government agencies in the future to negotiate lower drug prices with the industry. Education in the states is worse today than it was because the unconscionable income tax cuts for millionaires stripped the federal budget available for schools and shifted the burden to the states, which are running out of money because of the tax cuts and the blood-letting in Iraq.

And now the president of the United States tells us we can cure the country’s Social Security problems by “solving the red.”

Yes, the red. The country’s once regal dollar is now tramping around the world, increasingly shunned by the money managers. “Solving the red” for the crowd in Washington means borrowing two trillion dollars more to underwrite the partial privatization of Social Security.

Each time you hear that kind of stirring wisdom from the White House, you’re reminded that we may be coming closer to what another president, coincidentally the founder of Social Security, called a day “that will live in infamy.”

The country overcame Pearl Harbor. It may take longer this time.

---Jim Klobuchar

Copyright (c) 2005 Jim Klobuchar