Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- During the battle over President George W. Bush's plan to partly privatize Social Security, many of us engaged in the debate received long, lucid memos from a former Social Security commissioner. I used to receive similar notes from this particular person years before, when I was in the Clinton White House.

What was extraordinary was that the individual pounding out and faxing these memos was at the time 91 years old. It just didn't seem like a big deal to most of the Washington policy community, because everyone had just come to expect that from Bob Ball, who died four weeks ago at age 93.

Ball's Social Security resume probably never will be matched. He was Social Security commissioner under three presidents (John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon). He was one of the chief architects of Medicare, the national health-insurance program for the elderly. In his 80s, he was a key member of the president's Social Security Advisory Commission from 1994 to 1996.

When I was national economic adviser, he was a mentor and trusted counsel on Social Security. At our request, he trooped to Capitol Hill to speak with the House Democratic Caucus and top officials at the bipartisan White House Social Security Conference in December 1998. He wrote us so many smart and informative memos that he later turned them into a book that was published by the Century Foundation.

Nostalgia for Ball's accomplishments -- or even for his energy level -- doesn't do justice to his future-oriented spirit. Even in his 80s and early 90s, Ball was putting forward plans that were designed to both ensure Social Security's long-term solvency and its guaranteed benefit.

Privatization Foe

Ball's opposition to privatization wasn't based on resistance to change or opposition to investment. He understood that because investing in stocks, 401(k)s and even home equity carried so much risk, Social Security must remain the one leg of our retirement system that ``everyone can count on regardless of what may happen to the returns on individuals' supplementary savings.''

For a master policy wonk, Ball also was a student of the political art of getting things done. He was one of the few who understood that inducing a few brave politicians to outline that painful medicine wasn't necessarily the key to meaningful reform, especially when it can backfire by triggering partisan attacks that end up forcing legitimate ideas off the table.

Ball knew that the best hope for policy change was most likely to come from designing bipartisan processes that create enough temporary trust to allow members of different parties to do together what would be untenable for each to do alone.

Going Nowhere

Ball learned this firsthand in 1983 through his involvement in the Social Security Commission. The commission was convened after President Ronald Reagan's efforts to overhaul Social Security on his own had gotten ``exactly nowhere,'' as Paul Light, a Brookings Institution fellow and scholar of public institutions, wrote in the New York Times in March 2005.

In the 1983 commission, Alan Greenspan was essentially designated to negotiate for Reagan, while Ball was assigned to negotiate for Speaker Tip O'Neill. As former Office of Management and Budget director and O'Neill staffer, Jack Lew told me that the process gave the two sides some room to explore common ground without being exposed politically. Everyone understood that nothing was agreed to until everything was agreed to.

This wasn't a one-time event. As documented in former Clinton Legislative Director John Hilley's new book, ``The Challenge of Legislation,'' political opponents Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich were able to foster a bipartisan process that led to the 1997 Balanced Budget Agreement.

Standing Firm

President George H.W. Bush and his political foes -- Speaker Tom Foley, Senator George Mitchell and Representative Richard Gephardt -- were able to create the temporary trust to pass meaningful deficit reduction in 1990.

Of course, sometimes, you simply have to stand your ground as Clinton did when he accepted a government shutdown in 1995 rather than agree to deep cuts in our basic health and economic security programs.

Yet, if we care about tackling some of our most important and difficult challenges, all concerned must strive to find those opportunities where both sides can feel they are involved in honorable compromise and not abandonment of principle.

Thinking about how we can do that in the future on health care, climate change and even the ``third rail of policy'' -- Social Security -- may be the most fitting way to honor the memory of the late and extraordinary Bob Ball.

(Gene Sperling, formerly President Bill Clinton's top economic adviser, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and is advising Hillary Clinton in her bid for the 2008 presidential nomination. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Gene Sperling in Washington at gsperling@cfr.org

Last Updated: February 27, 2008 03:13 EST