How AARP Can Get Its Groove Back

By FREDERICK R. LYNCH
NYT

Claremont, Calif.

THE emerging debate over the future of entitlements is forcing an overdue identity crisis at AARP. Last week, leaders of the 37-million-member group issued a vague half-denial after news accounts reported that they were prepared to accept cutbacks in Social Security benefits. It was a wavering, confusing response that reflected mission drift and a loss of organizational focus and identity.

AARP, founded in 1958, needs to get its groove back and narrow a policy agenda that has become too broad, too busy and too ambitious, with multiple and competing identities, interests and constituencies. Over the past decade, under the leadership of the former advertising executive Bill Novelli, it developed a big-tent ideology in response to critics’ charges that it had been a lobby for “greedy geezers.”

But that trend has gone too far. Critics within the organization rightly say that what was once known as the American Association of Retired Persons might as well be renamed the “Association of Persons” — a tendency apparent in advertising messages like “AARP is an organization for people who have birthdays.”

Whose AARP is it?

(More here.)