WASHINGTON -- Before the fur really starts flying over Social Security, it would help to shun the heat providers for a spell in favor of the light providers.
Like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and John McCain.
George W. Bush, seeking love for a change in all the right places, is clinging to New York's finest and Mr. Straight Talk as if the retiring senator and the anything-but-retiring senator were life preservers.
Al Gore, normally friendly to change and new ideas, acts as if the most popular and successful effort in the history of the United States were still (in the famous phrase of Kirk O'Donnell, the late top adviser to Speaker Tip O'Neill) the third rail of American politics.
Contrary to nearly everything that has been said and written about Social Security recently, Governor Bush hasn't come within a country mile of Senator Moynihan's position, and John McCain's ideas continue to mock his.
And Vice President Gore, who professes disagreement with Moynihan, can't have examined his ideas in any depth, because if he did he would discover how truly progressive they are. Maybe that's why his campaign chairman, Tony Coelho, is quietly exploring a meeting among Democratic Social Security factions.
The best way to get past the talking points and sound bites of what passes for discussion on the campaign trail is to use the thinking of McCain and Moynihan as yardsticks with which to measure Bush and Gore.
For conservatives, McCain was always the genuine article. His Social Security position begins with the proposition that every cent of the surplus money generated within the system (roughly $2.3 trillion over the next decade) should be used solely for Social Security.
Bush, however, has a variation that makes his position suspect. Unlike the other three, the governor would not use the system's surplus to shore it up further - by reducing the national debt. Instead would divert the surplus to plug the revenue gap created by his proposal to let workers use 2 percentage points of their payroll tax to establish their own investment accounts.
That amounts to partial privatization. And by leaving the national debt still swollen in the trillions, Bush's ideas would also put pressure on the existing benefits structure down the road and probably require cutbacks and further increases in the eligibility age.
McCain was and is a better conservative. In McCain's thinking, the system's surplus would be used only to pay down the national debt. But in addition, he proposed during his campaign that two-thirds of the non-Social Security surplus (via the government's operating accounts) be used for Social Security as well.
That would enable McCain both to fund the transition period for the individual investment accounts and keep shoring up the system via national debt reduction. Of course, this would leave virtually no funds for possible national priorities like education and health care, but they don't call McCain a conservative for nothing. His twist is that he's upfront and responsible.
Senator Moynihan undercuts Governor Bush from a different direction, though like McCain his investment accounts would supplement as opposed to partially replace basic Social Security benefits.
Moynihan would begin by making some basic reforms in the system. The most important, by far, would finally fix the extent to which the government's Consumer Price Index overstates inflation - by about 1 percentage point. He would also finally make the system whole by bringing all workers into the system (especially uncovered state and local government employees) and by taxing benefits just like private pensions. And instead of raising the eligibility age, Moynihan would link benefits payments to life expectancy.
With those changes and their immense future savings producing an actuarially sound system, Moynihan would then make Social Security literally pay-as-you-go. That would permit a 2 percentage-point reduction in the payroll tax to 10.4 percent, leaving more than enough revenue (at least $800 billion over the next decade) to fund a transition to private accounts.
Eventually (in about 30 years), pay-as-you-go would produce a slightly higher tax rate as the last of the baby boomers nears death. However, as Moynihan likes to point out, compared with the benefits that can be delivered under the status quo, his changes plus the amounts generated by the investment accounts, would leave people much better off.
That's why Gore is off his rocker to rely only on national debt retirement to shore up an unreformed system. Doing so leaves him slamming Bush (correctly) for proposing partial privatization and threatening the current benefits structure.
But that's only half a campaign, and like too much of Gore's effort, it's all negative. Reform linked to an opportunity for working families to accumulate wealth is the best of both worlds, which is why Coelho is trying to arrange those meetings.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
