WASHINGTON — For U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, 2005 is starting to feel a lot like 1998.

That was the year then-U.S. Rep. Graham helped make the case against President Bill Clinton during the impeachment scandal, and the national news shows couldn’t get enough of him.

Once again, the media come calling:

• In the past month, he has appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and Fox’s “Special Report with Brit Hume.”

• The Washington Post’s editorial board asked him to come in for a chat.

• George Will has made him the star of his nationally syndicated column.

“My nose is peeling from the spotlight,” Graham joked recently to a dozen Washington reporters who had invited him to talk about overhauling Social Security.

That volatile issue — often referred to as the “third rail” of politics — has vaulted Graham back onto the national stage.

He is speaking about the perplexing domestic problem in the same simple, straightforward and often humor-laced style that made him a fixture on the evening news during the impeachment crisis.

Then, the little-known member of the House Judiciary Committee from Seneca showed a particular knack for summing up the wrenching drama.

His most famous quote from that era: “Is this Watergate or Peyton Place?”

Today, Social Security is the partisan battle that dominates Washington: How can the program be made solvent?

Graham is back with the earnest attitude, the folk wisdom and the one-liners, and they are as appealing to the press as ever.

But this time, Graham stands on a senator’s stage — far higher and less crowded than the one afforded him as a congressman. And beyond the clever one-liners, he is making his audience an offer that could extend his time in the spotlight indefinitely and perhaps lead the way to higher office.

Graham is staking out the middle ground on Social Security.

Though the conservative Republican supports the private accounts championed by President Bush and loathed by most Democrats, he has assigned himself the task of forging a bipartisan compromise — which some say is impossible.

A FIX-IT PLAN

Graham has a Social Security fix-it plan, but so do more than a half-dozen of his congressional colleagues, including freshman U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

DeMint, who holds a master’s degree in business administration, is known among Washington economists for his strong advocacy of private accounts and his mastery of Social Security’s complex math.

Graham, who holds a law degree, isn’t as impressive with the numbers. Rolling out his plan at a December news conference, he often called on aides to shout out helpful statistics.

What sets Graham’s plan apart — a Democrat-pleasing increase in the amount of income subject to Social Security taxes — only goes part of the way to explain why he gets so much airtime.

The other reason is that his plan comes with a story:

“When I was 21, my mom died. She was 52. She had Hodgkin’s disease. My dad died a year later. He was 69. We always thought he would go first. You don’t know about life. That’s the message I learned early on when I was in college. You just never know what’s going to happen. Everything is ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ one day, and the next day is upside down.

“They owned a small business — a restaurant, which really was a bar. And a pool room. The joke is I learned everything I need to know about politics right there. ... When they died, my sister was 13, and I was in college. We moved in with an aunt and uncle. ... Bottom line is, they never made more than $25,000, $30,000 a year in their whole life.”

The story ends with Graham and his sister beginning to collect Social Security survivors’ benefits, and then going on to college and productive lives. It also has a moral for those nervous about private accounts: Graham knows that Social Security, for millions of Americans, must remain a safety net.

BOTH SIDES OF THE AISLE

To bring the parties together on Social Security, Graham in past weeks has set up what at first were “secret” meetings of Democratic and Republican senators. He has suggested raising the income cap, and he has criticized President Bush for taking an overly aggressive tack on private accounts.

All this, packaged in Graham’s Upstate drawl and “aw, shucks” attitude, has won him attention.

“He has a populist style. He talks a lot about growing up in a pool hall. The idea that sticks to Bush — that he wants to do things for rich people — doesn’t stick to Lindsey Graham,” CNN political analyst Bill Schneider said.

“Graham is proposing an idea that Republicans and Democrats could conceivably agree on.”

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., says Republicans and Democrats are still too far apart on Social Security to imagine such an agreement, but he appreciates that Graham is “trying to find some common ground.”

As Graham tries to win the trust of Democrats, he seeks to reassure Republicans that he won’t over-compromise in the name of bipartisanship.

For his efforts, he has weathered some GOP criticism.

“I don’t know who Graham hires to advise him on economics,” said Hilton Head’s Tom Nugent, a contributing editor at the online version of the conservative National Review magazine, “but as far as I’m concerned, they should be referred to as Graham Crackers.”

But Graham — and many in the party who don’t agree with him on Social Security — remind that more than 90 percent of the time, he votes the GOP line.

“He’s got solid conservative credentials,” said Thad Strom, a Washington lobbyist who was chief counsel to the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C.

Graham’s growing reputation among Republicans and Democrats, combined with his trips to key presidential primary states — Iowa and New Hampshire last year — has pundits speculating for 2008.

Is he a candidate?

Graham says that he has “no desire to run for president in 2008” and that his mind is focused elsewhere. Every morning when he wakes and every night before he falls asleep, he says, he is thinking about Social Security.

“If I do well in Social Security, I know it makes me a much better senator from South Carolina. It would allow me to do more than I could ever do if I had not gotten involved in this issue.

“Ten years from now, 12 years from now, who knows what life holds for me?”

Reach Markoe at (202) 383-6023 or lmarkoe@krwashington.com.