Four S.C. lawmakers push plans to public

WASHINGTON - When U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint was a congressman from Greenville, the Bush administration gave him the equivalent of a call to the principal's office.

Except it was the Oval Office, and President Bush wanted to talk DeMint out of an amendment he planned to attach to the No Child Left Behind Act. Bush succeeded, but DeMint made more of the occasion.

"It gave me a few minutes to talk about Social Security before I left," he said. "It opened doors."

DeMint today works harder on Social Security than perhaps any other issue. He says the best way to save the system from bankruptcy is to allow U.S. workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes in stocks and bonds. He has authored a reform plan and will explain it to anyone who will listen.

DeMint is not the only South Carolinian in Congress who wants your ear on Social Security.

Fellow Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Reps. Jim Clyburn and John Spratt have been out front in the national debate, as well.

Graham has a reform blueprint. The details are different, but the premise is the same as DeMint's: personal accounts.

And Graham is no more shy about broadcasting his solution.

This week his face dominates the cover of Congressional Quarterly. His effort to reform Social Security is the political weekly's lead story.

National newspapers have noted how Graham is trying to rope Democrats into supporting GOP-style Social Security reform.

South Carolina has "two senators that have written their own plans," said Derrick Max, of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, a Washington-based group pushing for personal accounts.

"That's pretty darn unique."

The other side

As passionate as Graham and DeMint are about Social Security reform, another pair of S.C. politicians is just as determined to block its restructuring.

Reps. Clyburn of Columbia and Spratt of York are taking the case against personal accounts, which they prefer to call the "privatization" of Social Security, to the airwaves and town meetings across South Carolina and the nation.

This week, Spratt explained the predominant Democratic view on Social Security on the Diane Rehm show, which is heard on nearly 100 public radio stations in 24 states.

Also this week, Clyburn, with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, held a Capitol Hill press conference to warn that Republican reform of Social Security would hurt millions of Americans who receive its survivors' benefits.

On Wednesday, Clyburn and Spratt will hold a town meeting on Social Security at the University of South Carolina at Sumter. They will do the same the next day at Florence-Darlington Technical College.

Clyburn and Spratt will explain how the proposed changes could spell catastrophe.

Likewise, at similar events in South Carolina planned by DeMint and Graham, constituents will learn of the impending catastrophe should Congress not adopt personal accounts.

As both sides see it, on Social Security, there are many minds to be changed.

'A very heated issue'

Why is the Social Security debate so hot in South Carolina?

Mike Tanner, director of the conservative Cato Institute's Project on Social Security, said Gov. Mark Sanford campaigned hard as a congressman for personal accounts well before it was fashionable. His wins at the ballot box in the 1990s helped pave the way for other S.C. Republicans to take up the issue.

On the Democratic side, Tanner said, Spratt and Clyburn's seniority - with 22 and 12 years in the House, respectively - makes them natural spokesmen on the issue.

They also are party leaders. Spratt is the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, and Clyburn is vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

"This is a very heated issue, and South Carolina is going to be one of the centers of the debate," Tanner said.

As much as these politicians are talking to South Carolinians, they are not talking to one another on Social Security.

DeMint, for example, said it would be pointless to engage Spratt on the subject.

"It's senseless to debate someone who thinks we do not have a problem," he said.

Spratt responds that President Reagan sat down in 1983 with Democrats and hashed out a solution for a Social Security system in greater financial trouble than it is today. That fix did not include privatization.

A series of small adjustments worked well then, Spratt said, and should guide reformers today.

"I acknowledge there's a problem, but it's not so urgent that we have to rush into a solution," he said.