Chuck Blahous

For much of 2005, a battered Democratic Party sought to regain its footing by doing battle with President George W. Bush over his attempt to carve private investment accounts out of Social Security. The effort was widely viewed as a rousing success, stopping the initiative in its tracks and weakening a newly re-elected president, but the brains behind the Bush Social Security plan have not been vanquished. Far from it: Chuck Blahous was nominated to the Social Security Board of Trustees last week – by Barack Obama. White House aides say Blahous’s nomination comes courtesy of the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who gets to recommend an appointee to one of two public trustee slots on the Social Security Board. But it was Obama who sent his name up to the Senate, with nary a mention of his work championing what Democrats derisively called Social Security privatization. The nomination identifies Blahous as a former deputy director of the Bush National Economic Council and as the executive director of the bipartisan President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security.