The AP is certainly doing their best to make this sound as sinister as possible -

White House memo: Pitch Social Security doom

Rove aide strategy: Convince public system’s ‘heading for iceberg’

WASHINGTON - The success of President Bush’s push to remake Social Security depends on convincing the public that the system is “heading for an iceberg,” according to a White House strategy note that makes the case for cutting benefits promised for the future.

...“We have it within our grasp to move away from dependency on government and toward giving greater power and responsibility to individuals,” said Wehner, the director of White House Strategic Initiatives. He called the Democratic Party the “party of obstruction and opposition. It is the Party of the Past.”

But the administration must “establish an important premise: the current system is heading toward an iceberg,” Wehner’s e-mail said.

...“We need to establish in the public mind a key fiscal fact: right now we are on an unsustainable course,” the e-mail said. “That reality needs to be seared into the public consciousness; it is the precondition to authentic reform.”

The problem, of course, is that I'm in near complete agreement with this "agenda".  For now, I'll assume that you too are on board w.r.t. the goal of SocSec reform - I want to instead look at how the AP wants to frame the administration's tactics.

Every frigging aspect of Public Choice theory tells us that reforming (are more accurately reducing) a payola system that touches over 50% of the population is basically impossible.  The only way to break through the piecemeal rents that touch various aspects of the electorate and the literally thousands of special interests / PACs between them and the govt is to get the public directly involved.   Political capital - MASSIVE political capital - is the only way to take on this sort of project.     Anything less than widespread support and understanding of the project at hand inevitably degenerates into classic Public Choice gaming. 

[Daniel Drezner has a FANTASTIC post on how another politician the NYT loves to hate is trying to pull this off - Schwarzenegger.  The state of California is probably the only problem as hairy as Soc Sec reform.]

As a participant in many corporate initiatives (or, in Microsoft-speak "corporate jihads"), it's basic project planning step 1 to get the team aligned around goals, diction, talking points, and pulling in the same direction.  It's simply the cost of undertaking a large project that some of the diversity of opinion, tactics, and ideas found in a large org get sacrificed in order to get the project done.  Even at mighty Microsoft, we only had so much power to create success - far more of our energy was often focused upon creating the wave and riding it instead.  And getting the wave started takes focus and action in unison.   The Bush administration didn't create these rules, it's mass marketing 101 -- particularly when the entitlements are against you.

For me, this memo is absolutely indicative of a type of sharp-nosed project management going on here.   It's a feature, not a bug - and we need more of it, not less.  I'm sure it feels utterly inauthentic to our wide-eyed AP reporter but I can only imagine how few "corporate jihads" he's ever participated in.