Ryan Lizza over at The New Republic has a great article comparing the current Social Security debate with the Republican takedown of Bill Clinton’s health care plan. The similarities are overwhelming. Both cases concerned a powerless minority party taking on the pet issue of a newly-emboldened President. With the GOP, they turned their opposition into an overwhelming win in the 1994 midterms. If the Dems want to do the same, they’ve got a few lessons to learn. These two struck me as especially apt :

Being in the opposition means opposing. If there is one lesson that leaps off the page when rereading the history of Hillarycare, it is that Clinton’s foes were ruthless and systematic in their opposition to the president’s plan. When Hillary Clinton tried to reach out to senate Republicans in the spring of 1993, she found she could never schedule any meetings. It turned out that aides to Bob Dole had prohibited any Republican senator from sitting down with the first lady. A year later, when Democrats were trying to save the plan, Representative John Dingell reached out to a House Republican but was reportedly told, “John, there’s no way you’re going to get a single vote on this side of the aisle. You will not only not get a vote here, but we’ve been instructed that if we participate in that undertaking at all, those of us who do will lose our seniority and will not be ranking minority members within the Republican Party.”

Many Democrats today argue that their route back to power depends on transforming themselves into a party of reform. Some of these Democrats are scared that mere opposition–and denying Bush’s claim that Social Security faces a “crisis”–hampers their efforts. But Republicans faced the same challenge in the early ’90s and found that the two goals were not mutually exclusive. They didn’t just kill health care reform, they used its corpse as a platform to redefine themselves as a reform movement that swept away the senate majority.

It’s not just about Social Security. The Republicans knew in 1993 that they were not just engaged in a fight over health care but over the future of their own party. In a memo, conservative operative Bill Kristol warned Republicans that they had to “kill” rather than amend Clinton’s proposal. Its success “will re-legitimize middle-class dependence for ’security’ on government spending and regulation,” he wrote. “It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle-class by restraining government.” An almost perfect mirror-image of those sentiments applies to Bush’s proposal and the Democrats’ situation today.

A win on the Social Security issue, no matter how small, will be seen as a validation of the myth that government programs are inherently bloated and inefficient and that the private sector is always better suited to providing for the citizens of this country. If the Democrats ever want to regain control of the government, this sort of radical free market zealotry can never be allowed to pass.