PRESIDENT BUSH, touring the country to promote his view on changes in Social Security, comes to South Carolina today. The theme of this campaign has been that Mr. Bush just wants a full and honest debate on Social Security’s future, with all issues on the table. But we in South Carolina already have seen a less noble undertone to the push for change.

Sen. Lindsey Graham has been forging ahead in the debate, courageously trying to find middle ground on one of the most politically contentious issues in Washington. Aware of the nation’s long-term fiscal problems, he has refused to ignore them by just calling for huge, additional borrowing. Instead, he has proposed raising the cap on what annual income is taxed for Social Security, now at about $90,000.

For this display of good judgment and consensus-seeking, he is being vilified in campaign-style attack ads, cooked up by a national anti-tax group and run here in his home state.

The Club for Growth has been airing TV ads that decry Sen. Graham’s plan as “a really bad idea.” “You can’t help someone save for retirement by raising their taxes,” the ad says. Well, you also can’t rescue a major entitlement plan from fiscal peril with huge, added government borrowing. No bailout — of Social Security, Medicare or the federal budget deficit — will be painless. Saying otherwise is just pandering.

This campaign is nasty politics, and ill-timed. It comes as South Carolinians of different political stripes increasingly approve of Sen. Graham’s leadership and blunt talk on important issues. In trying to dent the senator’s credibility, the Club for Growth instead calls attention to its own flimsy trustworthiness.

The president’s defenders will be quick to point out that the Club for Growth is a third party, based outside the White House. But that’s a familiar refrain; South Carolinians can remember it from the 2000 GOP primary. The Club for Growth calls itself the “nation’s largest 527 political organization of economic conservatives.” If the president asked him to, Karl Rove could end this attack on Lindsey Graham with one phone call. Why, if he wants a full and open debate, wouldn’t the president do that?

The president’s own efforts to prompt the discussion have been less than straightforward. Earlier this month, he visited the federal office in West Virginia to disparage the U.S. notes that are owed to the Social Security trust from the government as “just IOUs.”

We hope the heads of European and Asian banks weren’t listening when the president of the United States so discredited government notes backed by the full promise of the United States. It’s their buying of similar Treasury notes, after all, that has financed America’s war effort and its budget deficit.

This president should be especially careful; it’s his big spending, on such items as Medicaid prescription coverage and a pork-laden farm bill, that has helped make this nation such an enormous debtor. His irresponsible wartime tax cuts have made our looming fiscal problems more severe.

America does need what the president says he is seeking: a full and fair debate about the options to stabilize not just Social Security, but our nation’s entire fiscal future. There have been too few efforts like Sen. Graham’s from any side to find common ground. The best step for President Bush to improve the atmosphere: Correct the distortions and attacks coming from the White House and its allies.