Republicans have issued an ultimatum to the American public — you have six weeks to change your mind about private accounts… or else!

Here’s the Washington Post:

White House officials are telling Republican lawmakers and allies on K Street that they must begin to overcome opposition to President Bush’s proposal for changing Social Security within six weeks, GOP strategists said yesterday.

The GOP strategists stressed that the six-week goal is not a hard deadline for a political breakthrough, but they said the public’s tepid view of Social Security change cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.

Talk about elite contempt for public opinion. And you know that the President’s plan is dead in the water when the war room’s job is to track the slow-motion collapse of elite support:

The Treasury Department yesterday announced the formation of a Social Security “war room” and the hiring of three full-time employees to help coordinate and refine the administration’s message on the issue. The war room, which the administration is calling the Social Security Information Center, will track lawmakers’ remarks to their local news outlets, to help the White House detect signs of Republican concern or Democratic compromise.

The office, modeled after the Coalition Information Centers that promoted the administration message around the world during the war in Afghanistan, will also help target speaking trips by top administration officials.

They just don’t get it. Bush can’t move the numbers no matter how good a “war room” he has. The fundamental reality is that presidents can’t significantly change public opinion on domestic policy initiatives. Private accounts are going down absent some sort of face-saving compromise.

Update 3/1 Chuck Grassley is also setting arbitrary deadlines for public opinion to change or he’s jumping off the bandwagon — why does everyone think the public is going to suddenly change its mind after weeks of debate?

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Finance Committee, said Monday that if public opinion did not soon begin to swing in favor of President Bush’s Social Security plan, it would be an indication that the plan was in trouble.

After a meeting with the other Republicans on his committee, Mr. Grassley repeated to reporters what he has been saying for weeks – that the success or failure of the plan depended on whether the president could persuade voters at the grass roots that the Social Security system was in jeopardy and that his approach was the right way to fix the problem.

…Mr. Grassley, the most important senator on Social Security policy, said that after holding 18 town meetings at home in Iowa last week, he believed that there was still “a lack of understanding” of the issue among his constituents and that if the president did not do a better job of teaching them, “nothing is going to happen.”

Right now, he said, “it’s too doggone early” to tell if Mr. Bush is making progress. Asked when that might be clearer, Mr. Grassley responded, “Maybe in another two or three weeks I would like to see some movement” in the opinion polls “or you might have some question about the president succeeding.”

There’s the understatement of the year.