[about Social Security] If it becomes public we've even discussed this, both sides will go crazy. It'll jeopardize our whole agenda on the Hill.
What if I do it? I'll do all the negotiating. You'll have total deniability. No one else in this building has to know.
And if it blows up, I'm supposed to pretend we've never met?
We'll always have Paris. [beat] Mr. President, life expectancy's rising. The biggest generation, ever, is retiring and we don't have the money! Every year we wait means we have to cut deeper, take away more, 'til Social Security's not enough to live on... 'til retirement's a one- way ticket to a flop house. We have an opening. There's seventeen ways to fix it. Twenty years of blue-ribbon commissions have told us how. This isn't a government program, it is a moral covenant. We don't want to be the administration that saves it from oblivion? We don't want that legacy?
Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
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