WASHINGTON – The battle over Social Security reform has become a battle for the legacy of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Acknowledging that President Bush’s proposed individual savings accounts cannot pass Congress without at least some Democratic support, Republicans are repeatedly invoking the legacy of the late New York senator to give the idea bipartisan credentials.

The approach is touching off a quarrel over the true views of a man who championed social safety net programs while also contemplating reforms that Mr. Bush’s supporters want to claim as the progenitors of their own.

Mr. Bush mentioned the four-term senator, who died in March 2003 at the age of 76, in January’s State of the Union speech.

Yesterday, reacting to a declaration from Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts that Democrats would not negotiate on Social Security reform unless the president dropped private accounts, Senator McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, again invoked the senator.

“Your old boss, Patrick Moynihan, felt that personal accounts were a good idea because it was a good investment for younger workers,” Mr. McConnell told Senator Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois, during a debate on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Such mentions rankle Moynihan’s only daughter, Maura Moynihan, a Manhattan-based fiction writer who said her father would not have supported Mr. Bush’s plan.

“First and foremost, I find it puzzling and somewhat suspicious that the Democrat constantly invoked as a purported supporter is dead and not here to defend himself,” said Ms. Moynihan, 47, in an interview.

“You can be damned sure that Senator Moynihan would be furious about the deficit and would ask whether the [Social Security] trust fund is being looted to feed the deficit or to satisfy right-wing ideologues who never accepted the legitimacy of government sponsored insurance in the first place,” she said.

The senator’s record on the subject is long and complicated.

An intellectual and a sociologist long concerned with the future of the Social Security system, Moynihan introduced a bill that would have created accounts as early as 1998. However, his daughter points out, his proposed accounts did not divert payroll taxes from the trust fund into private accounts, as would be the case under Mr. Bush’s plan. Instead, Moynihan proposed reducing payroll taxes by 2 percentage points from the current 12.4% for people who chose not to create accounts. Workers who chose to create such accounts would forgo the tax cuts, and the extra tax revenue would fund the accounts.

These were “add-on” accounts, not the “carve-out” accounts proposed by Mr. Bush, argues Ms. Moynihan. “That is the most important distinction,” she said.

But supporters of the Bush plan say the 1998 bill does not tell the whole story.

The senator later served as the cochairman of Mr. Bush’s bipartisan Commission to Strength Social Security, which was mandated by an executive order to propose ways to ensure the solvency of the system and create individually controlled savings accounts without raising taxes.

The commission proposed three different plans, which included moving some payroll taxes into the accounts, as Mr. Bush has proposed.

“He signed the commission report. He was co-chairman. It called for carve out accounts,” said the director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Choice, Michael Tanner, a strong advocate for such accounts.

“People can do all sorts of mind reading with him, but what he actually put his name to was a carve-out. Democrats very much want to turn [Social Security] into a party line issue. The fact that there was a prominent Democrat breaking ranks is hard for them to get around,” he added.

That view is shared by a specialist in Social Security at the Heritage Foundation, David John, who also supports the accounts.

“The problem with looking at Moynihan’s legislation was that his opinions appear to have been developing throughout. What he introduced in legislation doesn’t necessarily reflect what he was thinking at the time he served at the president’s commission,” Mr. John said. “While he might not have been 100% happy with the compromises that resulted in the commission’s recommendation, he still went along with them.”

The senator’s former spokesman said Moynihan did not agree with all of the commission’s recommendations, and that he took up the task out of patriotism and respect for the president’s request. Moynihan did not turn down requests of presidents, regardless of party, and he served in the Cabinets of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford.

“I don’t think it’s right for Republicans or Democrats to assume that Pat Moynihan would think anything about any particular Social Security idea,” said the senator’s former spokesman, Daniel Maffei.

“His views would be affected by the overall fiscal situation we face today,” said Mr. Maffei, who served as press secretary to Moynihan from 1997 to 1998, and is now a spokesman for Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem, a prominent critic of Mr. Bush’s proposals.

Ms. Moynihan agrees that the deficit would have changed her father’s views starkly.

“Dad proposed these things before the Bush administration created the largest federal government deficit in history – and before the war in Iraq, which is also costing billions of dollars a month,” she said.

Describing her late father as “a pragmatist” who felt that public policy had to be “adjusted in the light of altered circumstances,” Ms. Moynihan said he would not accept the president’s proposals.

Yet his public utterances appear to have left fodder for both camps.

In yesterday’s televised exchange, Mr. McConnell scolded Mr. Durbin for referring to the president’s plan as the “privatization” of Social Security.

“Senator Daniel Moynihan said about privatization, ‘That’s a scare word. That’s a scare word. No one is privatizing Social Security. Nothing of that sort is happening.’ Now, that’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic expert on Social Security. I wish he were still alive to be here and make that statement himself,” Mr. McConnell said.

And yet, Moynihan openly referred to the commission’s accounts proposal as “privatization.”

“Now it seems that all three factions of the Advisory Council on Social Security have effectively agreed to privatize the system in all or part,” he wrote in a 1997 op-ed published in the New York Times.

Later, in the same article, he wrote, “Privatizing Social Security would have problems, not least of which would be having the Government pick and choose stocks. (Quick, sell tobacco!)”

On the other hand, in the same article, he argued for a decrease in the rate of growth of benefits – a move similar to one contemplated by Mr. Bush that Democrats now decry as an unacceptable “benefits cut.”

Citing government studies showing that the consumer price index, which is used to calculate increases to benefits, overstates the cost of living by 1.1%, Moynihan wrote, “If we were to make that small adjustment in the annual increase in retirement benefits, the system would be in actuarial balance until 2052. And we could go on to other things.”

Bolstering the Democratic argument, he also warned that the introduction of private accounts could eventually lead to the end of Social Security and the unraveling of the New Deal social contract between citizens and the federal government – a common refrain of Democrats today.

Welfare reform “is the first step in dismantling the social contract that has been in place in the United States since at least the 1930s,” he wrote in an August 1996 op-ed piece in the Washington Post. “Do not doubt that Social Security itself, which is to say insured retirement benefits, will be next. The bill will be called “The Individual Retirement Account Insurance Act. Something such.”

What would the senator say today?

“I think he would clearly be demanding reform,” said Cato’s Mr. Tanner. “What plan would he sign on to? I don’t know.”

“The one thing he did not do was to cling to the old form of Social Security for its own sake,” said Mr. John.

But Mr. Maffei cautions against any posthumous interpretations.

“People who thought they knew what he was thinking were almost always wrong,” Mr. Maffei said. “Now that he has not been with us for almost two years, they are even more likely to be wrong.”