Matthew Yglesias has an interesting post on Talking Points Memo taking issue with a Washington Post editorial claiming that “For the past three months Democrats have declined to engage in a debate over Social Security”:

Now I’m not sure where Fred Hiatt lives, but here on the planet earth Democrats have very much been engaged in a debate over Social Security. There’s a debate on about whether we should have Social Security or whether it should be phased-out and replaced with something radically different. The White House initiated this debate by proposing that we get rid of Social Security, and Democrats have engaged by saying we should keep it. So far, Democrats are winning this debate.On Planet Hiatt there’s some other debate taking place about how we should phase Social Security out and what, exactly, we should replace it with. These can be interesting debates…

Nevertheless, this is a whole other debate from the one the country is having right now, which is about whether or not Social Security should be saved. That’s the debate Democrats need to be — and are — engaged in right now. They have no business engaging in the other debate. Anyone who’s genuinely confused as to how a pro-Social Security administration might make the numbers add up can look at any number of plans liberal wonks have put together. But those internecine debates within the Social Security faction are, at the moment, every bit as irrelevant as the internecine debates within the phase out faction. Right now, the debate is about phase out pure and simple. Bush, and the Post, are for it. Democrats are against it.

The issue is whether the debate is about solvency, private accounts, or both. Beltway pundits like Hiatt tend to defer to the establishment on the definition of an issue, and assume that the right answer lies somewhere in between the initial position of the two parties. So when President Bush says we need to have big private accounts and also fix the solvency problem, they say well, we need to create private accounts (just smaller ones) and to fix the solvency problem (though maybe differently than President Bush wants). And when people say Medicare/Medicaid and the general budget are bigger problems, the Post’s answer is utterly unconvincing:

Does anyone who’s watched the Social Security debate this year imagine that figuring out what to do about health care or Medicare would go just swimmingly?… Sadly, the Social Security debate so far has served chiefly to underline the difficulty, in a political environment dominated by dogma and short-term self-interest…. This is irresponsible, on both sides.

But so, too, would be dropping the subject. If they can’t solve this “comparatively minor problem” now, politicians are unlikely to be brave enough, or rash enough, to return to it anytime soon. And we hate to think how they’d face up to a comparatively major challenge.

In short, Social Security is on the agenda so we have to do something about it right now. But Democrats who want to take personal accounts off the table shouldn’t worry — the GOP proved during the health care debate of 1993-1994 that it’s easy to withstand elite pressure to do “something” if the other side is getting killed in the polls. The boundaries of elite debate are not set around Fred Hiatt’s conference table. And so I think the issue will be phaseout, which means that if Democrats don’t lose their nerve, they will win…