Read: The Nancy Pelosi problem

Aiding Bush’s effort was the fact that prominent Democrats had proposed tinkering with Social Security in the past. In his State of the Union address, Bush observed, “During the 1990s, my predecessor, President Clinton, spoke of increasing the retirement age. Former [Democratic] Senator John Breaux suggested discouraging early collection of Social Security benefits. The late [Democratic] Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended changing the way benefits are calculated.” Bill Clinton and Joe Lieberman had even toyed with private accounts.

But Pelosi, then House minority leader, wouldn’t take the bait. She denied that Social Security was in crisis. And she refused to offer a plan for changing it. When a member of Congress asked when Democrats would offer their own proposals, she replied, “Never. Is never good enough for you?”

Republicans called Democrats hypocrites for spurning proposals they had once supported. And centrist pundits, while admitting the problems with Bush’s proposal, criticized Democrats for not countering it. In a February 2005 editorial, The Washington Post slammed Democrats for their “silence about alternatives.” In a June editorial titled “Where Are the Democrats?” the Post acknowledged, “No doubt Democrats’ political instincts will be against engaging at this point: Why bail out Mr. Bush now, the strategists will argue, and let him claim that he led the way to putting Social Security on the path to solvency? … But there is also the little matter of what’s right for the country.”

Still, Pelosi, understanding that policy and politics are inseparable, did nothing. Irrespective of the merits of tweaking Social Security, she realized that offering Democratic proposals would divide her caucus and give Bush a political lifeline. Instead, she forced Americans to choose between Social Security as it was and Social Security privatization, maneuvering Bush into a battle that crippled his second term and laid the foundation for Democrats to retake the House in 2006. “The first thing we had to do in 2005 was take the president’s numbers down. Bush was 57 percent in early 2005,” Pelosi recently remarked to The New York Times’ Robert Draper. “His numbers came down to 38 in the fall, and that’s when the retirements [of congressional Republicans] started to happen.”

Pelosi is up to something similar today. Just as Republicans in 2005 reminded Democrats that they once supported altering Social Security, Republicans today keep reminding Democrats that they once supported a border wall. In his Oval Office address last week, Trump observed that “Senator Chuck Schumer … has repeatedly supported a physical barrier in the past, along with many other Democrats.” The former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen titled a recent column “Democrats Were for a Wall Before They Were Against It.”