Bush open to solutions for Social Security

COLUMBIA, S.C. — President Bush took his campaign to overhaul Social Security to the friendly territory of South Carolina on Monday, telling a joint session of the State Legislature that he was open to a range of ideas to fix the retirement program's long-term solvency problems.

Those ideas included, Bush said, raising the retirement age and progressive indexation, in which the pain of benefit cuts would fall more on people with higher incomes.

In addition, Bush said he appreciated an idea from an independent-minded Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has proposed raising the cap on the income subject to Social Security taxes.

The president was also complimentary about a proposal on the opposite end of the financial spectrum advanced by South Carolina's other Republican senator, Jim DeMint, who has insisted that Social Security's solvency problems could be solved by market forces if workers were allowed to invest a large part of their Social Security payroll taxes in their own investment accounts. Previously, Bush has said just the opposite, that investment accounts would not fix Social Security's solvency problems.

But Bush's embrace of the cacophony of ideas is part of a White House strategy to pivot from promoting a sense of crisis about Social Security, as Bush has sought to do in travels around the country over the past six weeks, to offering solutions.

"All these ideas are on the table, but they have one thing in common: they all require us to act now," Bush said in the 19th century State House, where six bronze stars mark the spots on the building where it was hit by Gen. Sherman's artillery shells when he burned Columbia in 1865.

Bush took a shake-every-hand, State of the Union-like stroll down the center aisle of the House chamber before he spoke, and he was greeted with cheers in a state where he waged a bitter campaign to win the Republican presidential primary against Sen. John McCain of Arizona in 2000.

But there was evidence that Bush was personally more popular in South Carolina than his plan to restructure Social Security, which is also struggling nationally.

The State, South Carolina's biggest newspaper and a supporter of Bush's re-election in 2004, greeted him with an editorial admonishing him to have an honest debate about the costs of overhauling Social Security and to order his allies to cease recent attacks on Graham.