The president’s Social Security plan isn’t even a plan yet, and already it’s in trouble. You can tell there’s trouble when (a) his own supporters are saying they’re still not on board and have to hear more; (b) a deeply respectable, non-partisan group like the Century Foundation says that private accounts would make the problem worse, not better; and (c) he leans on his mother for help.

There are few people in American public life more revered than Barbara Bush, and she traveled to Florida this month to stump for the Social Security plan because, as she told her son in not quite a stage whisper, “Your father and I have 17 grandchildren,” adding: “And we want to know, is someone going to do something about it?”

Someone is trying to, of course, and that would be her eldest, born in 1946, the first year of the baby boom. Not that he’s getting very far. There’s still no consensus that the system is in trouble; tweak by only a teeny bit the assumptions the trustees of Social Security use and suddenly – poof! – the problem suddenly doesn’t seem so very bad. And the Republicans were supposed to be the optimists in American politics!

Then there’s the remedy – private accounts. Hardly anybody argues in March what many people argued in January, that private accounts were the way to shore up the system. They aren’t and they won’t, and that’s not even taking into account the collateral damage that could occur. Here’s the Century Foundation’s assessment: “Privatizing Social Security will increase federal deficits significantly while increasing the likelihood that national savings will decline. As a result, long-term economic growth and the size of the economic pie available to pay for the retirement of the baby boom generation could be reduced.”

But still, the politics here are remarkably interesting. The Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that Americans oppose the plan by a 55% to 37% margin, and that by a 58% to 33% margin the more Americans hear about Bush’s proposals, the less they like them. Ordinarily you might think this was precisely the time for a conspiracy of silence.

Yet silent the administration is not. It’s still going full-bore. It’s telling blacks and Hispanics that Social Security, as currently constituted, isn’t a very good deal at all. It’s sending surrogates around the country touting the value of private accounts (which the White House prefers to call “personal accounts”). It’s breaking every known rule of politics, including deliberately agitating a huge, important voting group (Americans 18 to 29 years of age, whose 68% rate of disapproval is the largest among demographic bands).

Why? Damned if I know, but I have a guess. After years (12 of them, if you count the years of the presidency of Bush’s father along with those of his new boon pal, Bill Clinton) of prudence and caution, members of the Bush administration have adopted daring as the new White House leitmotif. They dare to impose tax cuts in a recession, they dare to try to make those tax cuts permanent, they dare to nominate the sorts of judges whom even Ronald Reagan wouldn’t contemplate selecting, they dare to take on the mainstream press in a way that even Richard Nixon wouldn’t consider. They dare, therefore they are.

They do it especially in foreign affairs. Few of the usual respectable national-security suspects thought the war on Iraq was a good idea, but they dared defy them all, even their own secretary of state, who promulgated the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it. They pressed ahead anyway.

They got more than they bargained for (in part because they didn’t get the weapons of mass destruction they planned for), but along with the continuing death counts are coming increasing peeps that maybe Bush might have started something good in the Middle East. Were my eyes deceiving me, or was that Joe Klein arguing in Time that perhaps George W. Bush merited consideration for a Nobel Peace Prize?

In this context, the dare on Social Security isn’t anything very remarkable at all. It’s completely in the context of the times and the politics. It has become commonplace to say that his opponents have underestimated President Bush. Most of the time that means they have underestimated his political skills and, most disastrously, his intelligence. He has both in surfeit, which is the kind of statement that gets his opponents really angry, probably because they have come to learn that it is true and wish desperately it weren’t.

But they also underestimate his determination. He believes in freedom, which is why he talked the way he did on Inauguration Day, and he believes in ownership, which is why he talks the way he does on Social Security. He believes. He may believe in things his opponents do not, but he believes.

Like so many of his rivals, he finds it hard to believe that everyone else doesn’t believe what he does.

That might be the best explanation for what he is doing – or will soon be doing, for there is very little flesh on the bones of his proposal right now – on Social Security. He believes it is better to own (securities or mutual funds) than to rent (which is essentially what a pay-as-you-go system like Social Security consists of), and he’s willing to fight.

But boy, does he have a fight on his hands. The unions are against him, AARP is against him, the Democrats are against him, some moderate Republicans are against him (though quietly), custom and history are against him. His mother’s for him (though you didn’t hear much talk about overhauling Social Security when she lived in the White House), and so are the big brokerage houses and the big-idea people of the conservative movement. But that’s it.

His friends on Capitol Hill are going to tell him to retreat. His instincts are going to tell him to fight on. There’s less and less evidence he can win, but there’s also less and less evidence that he’ll be dissuaded. Increasingly, the struggle is: Truth or dare.