Matt Zeitlin

Ann Bartow has a long, slightly odd post at Feminist Law Professors castigating Digby, Atrios and a whole host of netroots bloggers for being so strident in putting down Obama effort to attack Hillary by putting forth a plan to address the “actuarial gap” in Social Security:

Big blog bullies Atrios and Digby have declared that anyone who wants to talk about Social Security is not a liberal, and is “increas[ing] the likelihood of something very bad happening.” No pressure there, right? Well guess what, though I agree that any changes the Republicans want to make to Social Security are likely to be counterproductive at best, I also think that Social Security should be more re-distributive of wealth, as others have argued. See, for example, this, this, and this. I also would like to see some of the gender inequities addressed, see e.g. this, this and this. But in the narcissistic, elitist world of the Supposedly Liberal blogs, caring about this makes one “not a liberal,” and either the cause, or (more likely, at least in the blog world, if the bullies decide to make one pay for challenging them, the victim) of “something very bad.” Goddess help anyone with fresh and productive ideas or a taste for social justice in this climate.

I can’t help but think that Bartow as other problems with Atrios and Digby besides their dismissal of the Social Security “crisis”.  The real problem with her argument is that Obama’s rhetoric on Social Security buys into a particular frame — that social security reform is an urgent agenda item — that really serves two purposes: One, to find a large “crises” that the David Broders of the world can blame on both parties and two, to create an enviroment where conservative proposals to destroy Social Security will become acceptable (Garance collected some great quotes to this effect).  If Obama were talking about the problems with Social Security the same way Barstow does — saying that it needs to be redesigned so to distribute income more — than he wouldn’t be taking the same heat.  But saying that Social Security is facing some menacing actuarial gap that needs to addressed NOW NOW NOW isn’t really providing the space for taking the program further to the left.  Obama deserves all the criticism he’s been getting and Barstow seems to be willfully ignoring the pragmatic effects of a Democratic presidential candidate saying that Social Security is in even semi-urgent need of fixing.