Ohio Daily Blog – It’s always been a given that talking about changes to Social Security and Medicare to make them less effective is the third rail of politics — wildly unpopular, especially with that most reliable voting demographic, seniors. George Bush started pushing it in 2005, immediately after receiving his razor-thin “mandate” in the 2004 election. As he so famously told us, I’ve got a mandate and I’m going to use it.

Only it backfired on him. As he went around the country in the early months of 2005 talking up the idea, its unpopularity skyrocketed. The more people heard him talk about actually DOING it, the more they absolutely hated the idea.

With Republicans having managed to somehow frame Social Security as a villain in the shifty deficit “crisis” (it’s only a “crisis” when things benefiting the non-wealthy are on the chopping block, but vanishes as a concern when they are talking about tax cuts that go to the ultra-rich) and come up with the insane idea that throwing seniors off Medicare into the same boiling kettle of rapidly escalating costs as the rest of us, exploding the cost of health care in the U.S., there’s rumors afloat that somehow they’ve convinced President Obama to stick his head on the chopping block and propose this poisonous idea in a speech tomorrow. Pray to God they are wrong. It’s like their wet dream to execute this shredding of the safety net for the elderly but have someone ELSE take the political hit — and make no mistake, it will be costly.

Luckily, we have a Senator who is speaking out pre-emptorily against the idea: Sherrod Brown. He’s circulating a statement among fellow Democrats urging President Obama to stand strong against the idea of altering how Medicare works.

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