Obama's Social Security Claim Debunked

Campaigning in Florida on Saturday, Sen. Barack Obama attempted to capitalize on last week's turmoil on Wall Street to take a shot at Sen. John McCain's plan for reforming Social Security. Obama told the assembled crowd in the senior citizen rich state that under McCain's plan for Social Security, senior citizens would have lost their benefits as a result of the troubled investment market.

"I'll protect Social Security, while John McCain wants to privatize it. Without Social Security half of elderly women would be living in poverty - half. But if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would've had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week. Millions would've watched as the market tumbled and their nest egg disappeared before their eyes. Millions of families would've been scrambling to figure out how to give their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, the secure retirement that every American deserves."

Now, Factcheck.org is out with an analysis of Obama's comments and declares them to be "untrue." Obama was referring to McCain's support for private accounts within the Social Security system as a means of bringing the aging social safety net toward solvency. Factcheck.org points out that Obama's claim that current retirees would have lost their "nest egg" is a mischaracterization of the actual plan proposed by the White House and supported by McCain. Private accounts as envisioned by the plan would be voluntary, limited, and only open to people born after 1950. That means that no current retirees would have lost anything on Wall Street last week even if private accounts had been enacted by Congress in 2005.

Despite Factcheck.org correction of the record, the Obama campaign stubbornly stands by Sen. Obama's statement. Campaign spokesman Tommy Vieto attempted to clarify that Obama was talking about current workers who may have chosen private accounts when he spoke of disappearing assets. But that ignores the fact that Obama clearly referred to "elderly women" and "Floridians who rely" on Social Security in his remarks. That leaves the impression that Obama was attempting to scare seniors in the crucial state by insinuating that McCain wanted to take their Social Security and gamble with it on the stock market.


Sen. Obama, the campaign, and his supporters have made it a feature of their message that Sen. Obama is the victim of disingenuous attacks and commercials from the McCain campaign. The have also have highlighted Sen. Obama as a different kind of politician, determined to rise above the petty and small nature of political campaigns. But scaring senior citizens about Social Security is a time honored Democratic campaign tactic almost as old as Obama himself. Every time he stoops to the level of ordinary politics, Obama reveals that his chief selling point, his judgment and temperament, is itself just a campaign tactic, subject to change by the day or the audience.