New York Times Opposes Biggs Nomination

Some excerpts from the editorial page of today's New York Times:

A day after the midterm elections, President Bush announced that he had deputized Henry Paulson Jr., the secretary of the Treasury, to work with the new Congress on reforming Social Security. ... In an interview with The Times after the announcement, he [Bush] stressed the importance of bipartisanship. “We were going to have to build a consensus, no matter who won the election,” he said.

But then Mr. Bush nominated Andrew Biggs, a zealous advocate of privatizing Social Security, to a six-year term as the next deputy commissioner of Social Security. ...

Mr. Paulson — who has a reputation for pragmatism — could indeed be the right person to take the lead on developing a new set of reforms. But with the nomination of Mr. Biggs, Mr. Bush is signaling that he doesn’t want new ideas.

Mr. Bush’s choice of Mr. Biggs is also no favor to the man he has nominated to be the next commissioner of Social Security, Michael Astrue, a businessman who was an official in the administration of President George H. W. Bush. In a public exchange of letters before the election, Mr. Astrue told Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and Senator Max Baucus of Montana that he would follow the practice of the current commissioner, Jo Anne Barnhart, who has steered clear of the privatization debate....

The Times is mistaken on this last sentence. Astrue did not promise in his letter to stay out of the privatization debate. Astrue made a vague promise to be something like Barnhart, but made no specific committment on staying out of the privatization debate.Astrue may have already made some private committment to Democrats in the Senate, but his letter said no such thing. For that matter, Barnhart herself did not stay out of the debate completely, having contributed an op ed piece to the New York Times supporting privatization and having testified before the House Social Security Subcommittee more or less in favor of privatization, although her testimony, which came at a time when it was already clear that the President's plan would fail, did not sound like a ringing endorsement.