I know it's astroturf, but see how grass-like it looks

You coulda knocked me off a chair. Is the New York Times googling, finally, the supposed "grassroots" groups Bush is so fond of citing?

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - Introduced as a "single mom" from Iowa, Sandra Jaques was cool and confident as she praised President Bush's plan to partly replace Social Security with private savings accounts.

"I have a daughter at home. Her name is Wynter," said Ms. Jaques, sitting a few feet from President Bush at the White House economic conference on Thursday. "I want to make sure that she has Social Security when she retires as well."

Mr. Bush chimed in a moment later. "One of my visions of personal savings accounts is that Sandy will be able to pass her account on to Wynter as part of Wynter's capacity to retire as well."

The exchange was an example of how Mr. Bush promotes his agenda with testimonials from "regular folks," in the words of Joshua B. Bolten, the White House budget director, who introduced Ms. Jaques.

But Ms. Jaques is not any random single mother. She is the Iowa state director of a conservative advocacy group, FreedomWorks, whose founders are Jack F. Kemp, the former vice-presidential nominee, and Dick Armey, the former House Republican leader.

Ms. Jaques also spent much of the past two years as a spokeswoman in Iowa for a group called For Our Grandchildren, which is mounting a nationwide campaign for private savings accounts.

Her path to the stage was engineered by another advocate for private accounts, Leanne Abdnor, who previously organized a business coalition in Washington called the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security.

"Sandy is the perfect person to explain the benefits of this for women," said Ms. Abdnor, who has founded another group, Women for a Social Security Choice.

Ms. Abdnor said she had raised start-up money from friends, whom she would not identify. She said the group would wage a publicity campaign to counter groups that oppose private accounts.

This is a particularly illuminating passage:

The Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, started by Ms. Abdnor in the late 1990's at the behest of the National Association of Manufacturers, now includes powerful industry lobbying groups. The alliance has close ties to the White House. Ms. Abdnor was succeeded at the alliance by Charles Blauhaus, now an architect of Social Security policy on Mr. Bush's National Economic Council. "The power of our group rests on its Washington cache," said Derrick Max, the alliance's executive director.

Ah, remember that when some GOP stooge says that it's "Inside the Beltway types" who are stopping the "reform" of Social Security.

For more on SS, Krugman reminds us of the great success Chile had in privatization.

And Kevin Drum notes that the panelists on Bush's economic forum this week seemed to share a common theme: Deficits are bad, health care is the real crisis, SS privatization will be enormously expensive...but SS privatization is the right thing to do now.