ASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - After weeks of facing attacks
that his campaign and outside commentators called distortions, Senator John Kerry has begun criticizing President Bush on Social Security and the draft
in a manner that reaches far beyond Mr. Bush's positions.
Mr. Kerry may also have exaggerated the president's responsibility for
the shortage of flu vaccine.
On Social Security, Mr. Kerry said over the weekend that Mr. Bush
planned a "January surprise" that could cost retirees up to 45 percent of
their monthly checks. On the draft, Mr. Kerry told The Des Moines Register
last week that there was "the great potential of the draft" if Mr. Bush
won a second term. And on the vaccine, Mr. Kerry has maintained for days
that the president ignored warnings of a shortage.
"As John Kerry loses momentum and slips in the polls," a spokesman for
the Bush campaign, Steve Schmidt, said, "he's grasping at issues in the
headlines and makes a series of false and baseless attacks."
The truth is that Mr. Bush has promised not to cut the Social Security
benefits of current retirees or those nearing retirement age. He said
flatly in the debate on Wednesday that he had no plans to reinstate
military conscription.
And as for the vaccine shortage, experts say Congress is as much to
blame as the president for allowing domestic manufacturers to stop
production. In his years in the Senate, Mr. Kerry apparently never
addressed the matter, either.
A campaign spokesman, David Wade, said Mr. Kerry had not changed
tactics but had simply seized on issues at the top of the news to
illustrate that Mr. Bush "refuses to take the blame for anything" and
"consistently misleads the American people on important issues."
Social Security
Mr. Kerry's accusation on Social Security grew out of an article on
Sunday in The New York Times Magazine in which the president was quoted as
telling a group of Republican donors at a private meeting last month, "I'm
going to come out strong after my swearing-in with fundamental tax reform,
tort reform, privatizing of Social Security."
Mr. Schmidt said Mr. Bush had been misquoted and had never used the
word "privatization" to describe his policy.
At a church in Columbus, Ohio, on Sunday, Mr. Kerry jumped on the
passage. "The president's privatization plan for Social Security is
another way of saying to our seniors that the promise of security is going
to be broken," he said. "Even the president's own economic advisers say
that this'll blow a $2 trillion hole in Social Security."
He asserted that the plan could cost retirees "up to $500 a month" that
would otherwise be spent "for food, for clothing, for a grandchild."
For decades, Democrats have found mileage in painting Republicans as
threats to Social Security.
Since his 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush has advocated allowing workers to put
some of their Social Security tax money into personal retirement accounts
that could be invested in the private markets. The theory is that Social
Security payments would be reduced but that the shortfall would be more
than offset by the increased earnings over the years from the private
investments.
Mr. Bush has never endorsed a specific plan and has insisted that
benefits for current retirees and people near retirement age would never
be reduced.
A policy specialist on Mr. Kerry's campaign staff, Jason Furman, said
Mr. Kerry was relying on a study this year by the Congressional Budget
Office of one of three plans developed by a commission that Mr. Bush
established in 2001 to study establishing personal accounts under Social
Security. This plan was also analyzed this year in the annual Economic
Report of the President. Mr. Furman said it was fair for Mr. Kerry to use
figures from this plan, even though the president has not embraced it,
because it was the only one that staff experts in Congress and the White
House had analyzed.
The analyses showed that the plan would cost the government $2 trillion
- the number Mr. Kerry used - to keep paying benefits to retirees while
part of workers' taxes went to their personal accounts. The analyses also
showed that a 34-year-old now earning the median national income could
expect $342 less each month in government retirement benefits. Younger
people would have their benefits cut even more.
Mr. Kerry's implication, though he did not explicitly say it, was that
current retirees would have their benefits cut if Mr. Bush won.
The Draft
In the Des Moines interview, Mr. Kerry said, "With George Bush, the
plan for Iraq is more of the same and the great potential of the draft,
because if we go it alone, I don't know how you do it with the current
overextension" of the military.
Everyone agrees that the Army is overextended. But Mr. Bush insisted in
the debate on Oct. 8: "We're not going to have a draft, period. The
all-volunteer Army works."
In any event, the chances are extremely remote that Congress would
approve a general draft.
On Friday, Mike McCurry, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, suggested
that Mr. Kerry was "not alleging that there's a secret plan or anything
like that" for the draft but simply mentioning a possibility in answer to
a question from the paper.
Even so, a group that supports Mr. Kerry, Win Back Respect, said its
advertising in swing states raised prospects restarting the draft.
Flu Vaccine
Over the weekend, Mr. Kerry began ridiculing Mr. Bush about the vaccine
shortage, and his campaign began a television spot calling the problem "a
George Bush mess." Yesterday, Mr. Kerry offered his plan, including a
government promise to buy excess serum from manufacturers and create a
stockpile.
Mr. Kerry is correct about warnings of a shortage over the last year.
But like Mr. Bush, he never raised the issue until it erupted. Mr. Bush
said in the debate last week that the ultimate cause of the shortage was
manufacturers' fears of lawsuits.
Experts said that was not a main reason to halt production, because a
law already offers government protection against such liability.
Mr. Kerry's camp spread the word yesterday that the National Vaccine
Advisory Committee of the Health and Human Services Department had
reported the litigation threat was not a cause of the shortage.
That report was dated January 2003. It said, "Current vaccine shortages
do not appear to be liability related." Two sentences before that, it
said, "Today, litigation again threatens stability of the vaccine program
in the form of class-action lawsuits."
