I found the article How the White House is Putting Social Security at Risk by Heidi Hartmann.  It was posted on the New Deal 2.0 web site.

As they came under increasing pressure from Social Security advocates, the White House released a letter on Friday from Social Security’s chief actuary confirming that the Trust Fund would lose no money.

But the Trust Fund is not actually the advocates’ main concern. They’re more worried about being able to get the payroll tax up again in 2012 after the emergency situation of a tanking economy has hopefully passed. The central problem is a political one. Already some Republican members of Congress have said that a move back to 6.2 percent will be seen as a tax increase (in fact, close to a 50 percent increase), always unpopular, especially in an election year.

In Bill Clinton’s defense of the tax capitulation, he claimed that all the economists (at least the ones he chose to listen to) said that the economics of the proposal was not so bad.  Even if we grant him that the short term economics of the proposal aren’t catastrophic, the politics of the deal is horrible.  The long term economics of the proposal may be quite horrible because of the bad politics.  The Heidi Hartmann article is but one example of why Clinton has a long track record of making policy choices that aren’t so bad economically in the short run, but what they do to the political situation has dire long term consequences.