Beto O’Rourke’s nascent presidential run is going to have to confront a major scandal: He was caught talking sensibly about the federal debt and the need to reform Social Security in 2012.
Before his time as a liberal darling in his failed Senate campaign against Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, O’Rourke built a career trying to position himself as a reasonable centrist Democrat. That’s why, running in 2012 when the federal debt was a growing concern for many Americans, he talked about the necessity of reforming Social Security.
“This is precisely why people are so frustrated with Congress right now and why it has the lowest approval rating in U.S. history,” O’Rourke said during a Nov. 2011 debate while running for Congress in the 2012 cycle and reported by CNN. “The question was, ‘We have an out of control debt, where would you cut?’ I don’t know if anyone heard an answer. We heard about voting against Iraq, we heard about bringing Nancy Pelosi here to El Paso. I want to know where our congressman would cut.”
“Social Security, the people who paid into Social Security and who are earning their checks back from investment in Social Security, that needs to be protected. That’s inviolable. But going forward for future generations, for my kids’ generation, five, three, and one year old. Right now, we need to look at things like means testing,” O’Rourke said. He added, “We need to look at perhaps a longer a later age at which my kids are going to retire. That’s a tough decision. It’s not easy to say it’s going to be politicized by my opponent, but those are the tough things that you’re going to want me to weigh in on when I’m in Washington, DC.”
In a debate that following March, he said, “There are certainly places in the federal budget where we have to look at reorganizing, where we have to look at cutting … And we really don’t have a choice. You have a $16 trillion debt. We’re running $1 trillion annual deficits, and we cannot continue to spend ourselves into ruin. We need to elect people who are gonna go up there and make some tough choices.”
Such ideas are completely reasonable, especially given that Social Security is slated for automatic benefit cuts of nearly 25 percent in 15 years and that we’re entering an era of unprecedented debt levels. But O’Rourke is seeking the nomination of a party in which it’s become popular to propose tens of trillions of dollars of new spending and dismiss questions about how it would be paid for. Thus, the comments are likely to haunt him if he ever becomes a genuine threat to anybody. So, it isn’t surprising that his staff is trying to distance him from the comments.
A spokesman told CNN: “On Social Security, Beto was acknowledging that it’s very possible Congress would look at that debate around raising the age in the future. He does not say he supports it or recommends it. Beto was interested in looking at possible ideas for ensuring the solvency of Social Security for future generations,”
