I'm not going to waste much time thinking about this. Even if Obama gets elected president, he won't have the power to fix something as entrenched as Social Security. Clinton tried, Bush tried -- nothing happened.

It's just not one of the things a president can do on his own. If he could come up with a plan that was supported by 60% of the Senate and House, he might have a shot. But of course that's never going to happen.

LBJ launched the "war on poverty", at the same time we were fighting "the war on vietnam"

we lost both, unfortunately.

the lesson being, however, that a president who has "long coattails" (that is, he's perceived as creating or sustaining his party's majority in congress) is frequently given a lot of lattitude by his party to engage in his personal fantasies, without proper oversight.

obama may very well be permitted by his party to remake social security in ways that suit him.

clinton was not given that opportunity by the republican controlled congress.

We may never again see a president who has as much power as LBJ did. Not only was he one of the most skillful operators in the Senate in US history, but he had huge public support as the heir to JFK. And people trusted presidents more in those days -- things went way downhill after Watergate.

Today, even having a majority in your own party in Congress doesn't guarantee you'll be able to do anything you want -- as both Clinton and Bush discovered. It's all about consensus now, which is just a euphemism for mediocrity. But as a cynic I generally prefer legislative inaction to sweeping reform, so...