[While serving in the Senate, Alan Simpson, the co-chair of the President's Deficit Reduction Commission] disagreed with the AARP’s [American Association of Retired Persons] positions on Medicare and Social Security, [and] believed the group was obstructing budget cuts that Republicans needed to make in order to offset a planned round tax cuts. Simpson held hearings on the AARP’s finances. “I’m a chairman. I can have hearings,” he boasted to reporters in the Capitol corridor, dancing a little jig and pumping his arms in the air. A few days before he announced the hearings, Simpson said “People ought to know where their money comes from and what it’s used for.” As I reported at the time, Simpson never produced a smoking gun, but he created plenty of smoke, focusing on irrelevancies like the size of AARP’s new building and its executives’ salaries.
But the AARP recognized what the hearings were really about. At a meeting with AARP’s board and staff, Simpson told them “I want you to know that the intensity of my investigation will be directly related to the intensity of your fight on Medicare.” In an interview then, AARP’s chief lobbyist John Rother told me: “Many people on the right wing realized that AARP was the force to contend with. They realized they wouldn’t get anywhere unless they dealt with us as an institution.”
Let me hasten to add that AARP should not be above criticism. My opinion is that it is little more than an insurance company posing as a nonprofit grassroots membership group. A genuine grassroots membership group of retired persons would be a far more formidable force than the AARP.
