WHEN YOU MOVE AGAINST THE KING YOU HAVE TO KILL HIM:

The Republican Moment: Will the GOP have the courage, at last, to change the face of government? (PAUL A. GIGOT, January 20, 2005, Wall Street Journal)

When President George W. Bush looks down across the mall today to deliver his second inaugural address, he will survey a Republican landscape. Not since 1928 has a president continued GOP control of the White House into a new term along with a re-elected Republican House and Senate. So it is fair to say that we are about to find out if the GOP really is a governing party.

I don't mean "governing" in the sense of merely making the Beltway trains run on time and surviving as a majority. The Republican test going forward, and one voters should hold them to, is whether the party can now put its permanent stamp on Washington in a way that is consistent with its professed conservative philosophy. More than just a challenge for Mr. Bush, the next two years will tell us if this GOP majority is made to last or will be as evanescent as the Whigs.

Whatever one thinks of its policies, the Democratic Party surely made a difference during its 20th-century heyday. Set aside its last, corrupted years in power. When liberalism was ascendant, from the 1930s through the 1970s, Democrats permanently altered the face of government. [...]

Mr. Bush is making Social Security his first priority, and rightly so. It is in some ways the politically most difficult, but it is also the intellectually clearest. Private Social Security accounts aren't a radical idea and have been tried with success other places in the world. They have great appeal to young people, who correctly see that Social Security won't otherwise be there for them, yet they don't threaten the benefits of older Americans. The transition costs have to be accounted for, but this is mainly a question of budget math and political judgment.

The reform is well worth any political risk because, among other things, it would rewrite the social compact across generations. Young people would be able to save for their own retirement, not consign 12.4% of their paycheck to transfer payments. The reform would instantly reduce the federal government's long-term liabilities, and above all it would make every American from the first day of work a member of the investor class. Over time this will reduce the demand for government, which ought to be a major Republican goal.

Republicans made a fundamental mistake after the Reagan and Gingrich Revolutions, which they'd be wise to avoid this time (but probably won't because not wise): they convinced themselves that by not enacting the reforms they'd been elected to effect they'd not be blamed for having wanted to. If reform of Social Security really is as deadly an issue politically as some still think--a notion which the two victories of Mr. Bush and the recent success of Republican Senate candidates like Liddy Dole would seem to repudiate--then the Party will pay at the polls in '06 whether it passes these reforms or not. So, why not at least pay the price for an achievement.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 20, 2005 10:01 AM