Sorry, Mort!

Yesterday I linked to a Mort Kondracke piece in which he claimed "by 55 percent to 42 percent, young voters think that private accounts are 'a good thing,' even if it means cuts in their guaranteed benefits." I pointed out a Gallup poll that said just the opposite, and thought I was done.

Of course today I found Mort's poll. Sorry I doubted you. But as Ruy Teixeira points out, it's only clever wording that gives the privatization of Social Security such high marks:

The change in the guaranteed benefit that is mentioned in the WP/ABC questions is not described as a cut in the guaranteed benefit but rather as "a reduction in the rate of growth in Social Security benefits for future retirees"--a question wording that no doubt elicited broad smiles down at the White House and in the offices of Congressional Republican leaders.

And I'm sure it's true that if the massive cut in guaranteed benefits proposed by Bush is uniformly referred to simply as a reduction in the rate of growth of benefits, Bush's plan could have pretty smooth sailing. But of course that's not where the debate is going to take place and it's rather odd that the WP/ABC poll chose to use the locution favored in RNC talking points, rather than the straightforward wording favored by other pollsters.

So these particular results should be treated very skeptically.

The whole roundup of polls is a darn fine read, I might add. You should check it out in whole.