President Bush is still in the opening phase of a campaign to sell the public and Congress on his ambitious plans for Social Security, but some Republicans on Capitol Hill have decided it is not too early to begin pondering an exit strategy.
With polls showing widespread skepticism of Bush's proposed individual investment accounts and Democratic lawmakers expressing nearly uniform opposition, some allies of the president are focused on possible split-the-difference deals.
As described in interviews, most of these compromises would involve Bush significantly scaling back his proposals for restructuring the popular retirement program. In exchange, he could still claim an incremental victory on what he has described as his core principles: enhancing the long-term solvency of Social Security and giving younger Americans options to invest more of their retirement money.
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White House officials said Bush is open to such a compromise and will continue to signal this publicly in the days ahead.
But all this maneuvering assumes that Democrats are looking for compromise -- rather than the opportunity to hand Bush the kind of monumental defeat that President Bill Clinton suffered 11 years ago with his proposal to change the health care system. Clinton's signal error, most of his aides concluded in retrospect, was not dropping his plan in favor of a bipartisan deal on more modest legislation while he still had enough political leverage to bring Republicans to the table.
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