In Speech, Bush to Stress ‘Ownership’

NEW YORK CITY —  President Bush plans to stress themes of “ownership” and government reform in his acceptance speech Thursday, positioning himself to reprise one of his most effective arguments against Democrat Al Gore in the 2000 campaign.

Without offering many specifics, Bush is likely to pledge to restructure Social Security, the tax code and the healthcare system with the common goal of shifting more control and ownership away from government toward individuals, according to sources familiar with the speech’s preparation.

“The big label will be reform -- Social Security reform, reform of our institutions of government, reform of healthcare, and the concept of ownership,” said one senior GOP strategist who asked not to be named.

Bush strategists believe this agenda will allow them to frame the campaign’s domestic debates as a choice between the president’s push to empower individuals and proposals by Sen. John F. Kerry that they will portray as a return to big government.

Even some Democrats agree that in the 2000 campaign’s final stages, Bush scored points against Gore by hammering at that same argument, declaring, “He trusts the government, I trust the people.”

Democrats acknowledge that the themes of choice, ownership and individual control that Bush is expected to stress could have long-term appeal in a society where more Americans own homes and businesses and participate in the stock market. But Democrats also believe the president will have difficulty selling his agenda when so many Americans are feeling insecure about their jobs, the costs of healthcare and the security of their pensions following drops in stock prices and corporate scandals.

“There may be a moment for [Bush’s] argument, but not after three years of decline,” said Democratic strategist Stanley B. Greenberg, Gore’s pollster in 2000.

Much of Bush’s Thursday speech will make “the case for continuity in the war on terror,” and argue that he has made “big improvements on Medicare, education and tax cuts” at home, said the strategist familiar with its drafting.

But the strategist said the speech also would look ahead and was intended to cement an impression that Bush would pursue “big ideas” in a second term.

It remains unclear how much of the domestic agenda Bush mentions in his speech will truly be new. Several of the ideas he’s likely to spotlight are measures he’s endorsed throughout his presidency. Among them:

* Restructuring Social Security to allow workers to invest part of their payroll taxes in the stock market;

* Providing tax credits to help uninsured workers and families buy health insurance;

* Providing subsidies to help lower-income families buy a home;

* Creating new tax-free accounts that individuals could use to save for retirement or buying a first home.

One new area of emphasis for Bush is likely to be a pledge to pursue tax-code reform meant to simplify and streamline the system. Bush has hinted at interest in some kind of national sales tax, and many Republicans have long called for moving away from the progressive income tax toward a flatter tax system that would reduce the number of rate brackets while eliminating many existing deductions.

But insiders say the president is unlikely to embrace a specific plan -- either Thursday or through the campaign -- focusing rather on pledging to work across party lines for reform based on principles such as simplicity.

Bush advisors said the president wanted to maintain a balance between revealing enough of an agenda to reassure voters that he hadn’t run out of ideas for a second term, while avoiding specifics that could provide a tempting target for Kerry and his Democratic presidential campaign.

Yet Bush’s emphasis on reform and an “ownership society” could frame a clear contrast with Kerry’s priorities.

These differences may never command center stage in a campaign focused on terrorism and jobs. But the two men are presenting choices that point toward radically different conceptions of how social insurance should operate not only for the poor, but all families.

In recent speeches, Bush has argued that a key to reducing economic insecurity is to allow average families to own their health insurance and retirement plans, rather than relying on employers or government programs to provide them.

With workers more likely to change jobs or careers than those of earlier generations, “one way to bring stability and security into a person’s life is to encourage ownership,” Bush has said.

But Kerry argues that the ideas Bush promotes as increasing ownership are really intended to shift the risks of retirement and healthcare from government and employers toward individuals. Kerry and other critics maintain that individuals can achieve greater economic security by remaining within collective programs meant to spread risk over a large pool of participants, such as employer-provided healthcare, Social Security and Medicare.

“Bush is offering a return to the pre-social insurance world in which people bore risk mostly on their own,” said Theodore R. Marmor, a professor of public policy at the Yale University’s School of Management. “Kerry ... wants to preserve the spreading of risk in the name of stability.”

This philosophical difference is clearest on healthcare and Social Security, the two issues in Bush’s ownership agenda likely to provoke the sharpest clashes between the candidates in the weeks ahead.

Kerry’s healthcare plan is intended to buttress the existing system, under which more than 90% of Americans with health coverage are insured either through their employers or a government program, such as Medicare or Medicaid.

Kerry wants to alleviate the pressure of rising premium costs that are driving more companies to drop coverage by having the government assume most of the financial responsibility for the most expensive cases. He also would seek to cover nearly 27 million of the 45 million Americans without health insurance, primarily by expanding existing public programs.

Bush, by contrast, builds his healthcare initiative around tax credits to help the uninsured buy policies on their own and tax-favored plans called Health Savings Accounts that individuals can use, in conjunction with insurance policies to protect themselves against catastrophic costs, to pay for healthcare expenses out of their own pocket.

Both of these ideas envision a future in which more individuals would purchase insurance directly and fewer would receive it through work or government. The administration said Bush’s plans would give Americans more flexibility to obtain plans that meet their needs, while Kerry’s proposal would snarl the healthcare system in more government controls.

Democrats said Bush’s ideas would cover only a small fraction of the uninsured -- largely because the tax credit would be too small to help many buy insurance -- and would strip Americans of the bargaining power that large pools of participants provide.

“This is not about owning a piece of the rock,” said Sarah Bianchi, a Kerry advisor. “This is about being left in the lurch.”

The same arguments of control versus security ring through the debate over individual investment accounts under Social Security. Bush in his speech is expected to reaffirm his commitment to carving out part of the payroll tax for individual investment accounts, GOP officials say. But he is unlikely to endorse a specific plan before election day or explain how he would fund a transition to a new system, which a commission he appointed estimated could cost as much as $2 trillion over the next decade.

Kerry says opening Social Security to such private accounts would leave Americans too exposed to the risks of the stock market at a time when most private pensions only provide workers funds to invest, rather than a guaranteed benefit upon retirement.

Kerry says that the existing Social Security system, with a guaranteed benefit large enough to ensure a decent retirement, can be preserved if Washington makes progress toward a balanced budget.

Republicans say that an individual account would be more secure than the promise of a future benefit that Congress could trim. Similarly, they say, the expanded tax incentives Bush is proposing for healthcare and retirement savings would provide workers more security than employer-based benefits that companies could revoke at some point.

The more immediate goal for Bush, his backers say, is to produce a program that reassures voters he has a clear agenda for a second term -- and provides him some momentum to advance that agenda if he wins.

“It’s a pretty important speech for Bush precisely because he hasn’t said anything on the stump about what he’s for and what he’s not for in a second term,” said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a leading conservative political action committee. “If you want to do anything in your second term of substance on a domestic policy, you’d better start talking about it now.”

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Hostile territory?

New York City is a solidly Democratic metropolis. Of 8 million residents, there are:

2.8 million registered Democrats

524,000 registered Republicans

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Protesters on two wheels

About 5,000 protesters on bicycles -- part of a movement called Critical Mass -- clogged Midtown Manhattan on Friday night. Of the pedicabs, Wonder Woman look-alikes and hollering cyclists, the N.Y. Police Department said: 264 people were arrested;

238 bikes were taken into custody.

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2,508’s a crowd

The 2,508 Republican delegates who will fill Madison Square Garden this week will make for the largest GOP convention group in recent history, Congressional Quarterly reports.

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Don’t let it get to you

The modern delegate has a lot to contend with, including face-offs with bomb-sniffing dogs and protesters. But the convention is taking mental health to heart. Experts from St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers are on hand to offer stress counseling, Associated Press reports.

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The new kids in town

New York has five previous political conventions under its belt -- all Democratic:

* July 4, 1868, at Tammany Hall: Horatio Seymour is nominated; he goes on to lose the election to Ulysses S. Grant.

* 1924, old Madison Square Garden: John Davis is nominated (over 17 days); he loses to Calvin Coolidge.

* 1976, Madison Square Garden: Jimmy Carter is nominated; he goes on to defeat President Ford.

* 1980, Madison Square Garden: Carter again; he loses to Ronald Reagan.

* 1992, again at Madison Square Garden: Bill Clinton is nominated; he goes on to beat George H.W. Bush.

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Delegate diversity

Republicans are promoting this year’s delegates and alternates as the most ethnically varied and gender-balanced in the partyÕs history.

White or not specified 4,056 Latino 297 Black 290 Asian 104 Other minority 105

Minority Women ’96 6% 33% ’00 10% 36% ’04 17% 44%