It's a strange election season: Nearly everyone's running against President Clinton, who isn't on the ballot. And each party is accusing the other of seeking Social Security cuts, which no one has proposed.
Slashing Social Security is an even more heinous political sin than proposing tax hikes - something few politicians since Walter Mondale in 1984 have openly advocated.No wonder Clinton was glad to have a chance to get out of the country for a week.
Politicians like to take credit for reducing the federal deficit, but no one wants to be caught suggesting it be done with higher taxes or with cuts in popular benefit programs such as Social Security or Medicare.
Thus, Republicans have been gleefully jumping on the administration for a leaked memo from budget director Alice Rivlin that lays out a series of unpopular steps to shrink future deficits - including Medicare and Medicaid cuts and limits on mortgage deductions on income taxes.
"I think what struck people was the hypocrisy and the cynicism of Dr. Rivlin and the Clinton administration attacking Republicans while they were writing the very memos they were attacking about," Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said Tuesday on NBC-TV's "Today" show.
Gingrich has been the GOP's pit bull this political season.
And, since the outspoken Georgia Republican is in line to become speaker should Republicans gain control of the House, he has become the focus of much of the Democratic counterattack.
On Tuesday, Democrats circulated news clips showing that Gingrich, first in 1986 and again in 1990, proposed overhauling the current Social Security system and moving it toward privatization.
Gingrich is "the single biggest threat to the future of Social Security," said his Democratic congressional challenger, Ben Jones.
In another escalation of the Social Security war, Vice President Al Gore asserted that the midterm elections on Nov. 8 are "a choice between protecting Social Security and robbing it."
Democrats say the GOP's "Contract with America," signed on the Capitol steps earlier this month by more than 300 GOP House candidates, would cut Social Security as much as 20 percent. The document promises tax cuts without explaining how they'd be financed, but it doesn't propose cutting Social Security.
Nevertheless, Gore told a luncheon audience Tuesday, "Read the fine print in the Republican contract and don't let them sign away your Social Security."
The administration, meanwhile, has spent the last few days trying to make the Rivlin memo vanish. Clinton's chief of staff, Leon Panetta, called it "merely a catalog of ideas."
And the president, before he began his five-day Mideast trip, sought to blame Republicans for the memo - suggesting it was intended to list situations that might arise if the GOP wins control of Congress. "The straight story is that that was not an options memo for us," he contended.
Republicans, burned on Social Security before, aren't about to let it happen again. In 1983, when they controlled the Senate, GOP leaders proposed a deficit-reduction package that included a temporary freeze on Social Security benefits.
Not only did Democrats use the proposal as political ammunition, but then-President Ronald Reagan pulled the rug out from under the GOP Senate leadership by vowing to veto any such measure.
The political sensitivity of the subject was driven home anew last month, when several senior Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee, including its former chairman, Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, proposed what they said were "modest changes" to protect the solvency of the system into the 21st century.
These included raising the retirement age from 65 to 67 by the year 2027 - and a one-time cut in benefits in 1995 of about $3 a month for current recipients.
The Republican National Committee mirthfully distributed poster-size duplications of news stories on the proposals, with headlines like: "Democrats Want Social Security Cuts" and "Democrats Offer Painful Plan for Social Security."
But with control of the House and the Senate hanging in the balance, Social Security - often called the "third rail" of American politics - is no laughing matter for either party.