Both Parties Claim Entitlement From Medicare Package
WASHINGTON — The landmark Medicare reform package President Bush steered through Congress last week seems more likely to intensify than resolve the debate in the 2004 campaign over how to provide health care and retirement security for seniors, analysts in both parties say.
The legislation itself promises to be a flashpoint, with Bush touting its new prescription drug benefit as proof that he has delivered a "compassionate conservative" agenda, and his Democratic rivals portraying the bill as a giveaway to drug and insurance companies.
Just as significant, Republicans close to the White House say Bush's success at forcing through Congress structural Medicare reforms will stiffen his resolve to pursue even more ambitious changes in Social Security -- a potentially more explosive issue in next year's election.
"This gives him the capacity to run on reforming Social Security," one GOP strategist familiar with White House thinking insisted.
The debate over entitlement reform is sharpening as seniors have become an increasingly fluid constituency, less firmly attached to either party and more influenced by the same constellation of values issues that are driving many younger voters.
"In the past, you were dealing with a monolithic bloc, and it was Democratic," said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida, who has studied voting patterns among seniors. "Now you are looking at a diverse block of voters."
That means the struggle between the parties to define the prescription drug benefit next year is likely to be only one factor, and possibly not the major factor, in determining how seniors vote.
"Good or bad it's not going to be as decisive as people think," said Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic public opinion analyst.
"The prescription drug issue, per se, has always been less potent than Democrats believe. I think Democrats can turn this bill so it isn't a positive for Bush, but even if they don't, that doesn't make seniors a lock" for Bush, he said.
An enduring myth in American politics is that seniors vote reliably Democratic, largely because of the party's support for Medicare and Social Security, the two pillars of the social safety net for the elderly.
But as MacManus noted, the picture has been more complex in recent years. From the 1980s through the early 1990s, most seniors supported Democrats in congressional elections, according to network exit polls. But the Republican presidential candidate won a majority of seniors in every presidential election from 1972 through 1984.
