Brad DeLong wonders why the Economist is puzzled by the fact that in their poll of economists, the economists are more supportive of Kerry despite the fact that they also tend to support entitlement reform which Bush notionally is more likely to support.
It's simple, and it's very similar to what led to the whole Iraq debacle. As Brad points out, Bush hasn't actually made any actual proposal for, say, partial privatization of Social Security. But, there are a lot of completely wrongheaded people out there, convinced that they're "in the know" on this subject and everyone else is just naive, who believe Social Security is doomed. There are also a lot of completely wrongheaded people who believe that Social Security is doomed and the only way to "fix" it is to privatize it. And, then there are bunch of mostly, but not entirely, wrongheaded people who think some sort of mandatory private savings system has merits for a variety of reasons all over the ideological map. Since there is no actual Bush plan, all of these people get to project their personal pet plan for Social Security onto Bush. They imagine Kerry will "do nothing," so there's no way their pet plan will be enacted, but since Bush will "do something," there's some chance that whatever he does will resemble what they want him to do.
Much as many smiliar people did with the Iraq debacle, all of these people assume that "doing something" must be better than "doing nothing." That line of thinking was disastrously wrong then and it'll be disastrously wrong with Republican-led Social Security reform.
Fortunately it appears the economists are a bit smarter than The Economist.
