WASHINGTON -- Frustrated by Congress' failure to move on Republican plans to address Social Security problems, Sen. Rick Santorum yesterday said he thought that the White House had made a "fundamental error" in handling its public relations campaign to restructure the federal retirement system.

Looking back on the last year, Santorum, R-Pa., said he had struggled to understand President Bush's decision to come out "right after the campaign" -- without allowing the 2004 presidential election fervor to cool -- "with this mandate that you're going to change the sacred cow of the [political] left, who've just been energized beyond belief.

"You've just defeated your opponent, and, you know, you take a 3-iron to the beehive," Santorum said. "You go out there and whack the beehive, and you wonder why all these bees are buzzing around your head. And not only do you whack the beehive, but then you don't do anything [more] for two months."

Santorum, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference as well as head of a Senate subcommittee on Social Security, said that as soon as White House officials told him that they were going to roll out Social Security reform initiatives in 2004, he urged them to construct a plan on the order of a presidential campaign, believing that "it was bigger than anything we've tried to do."

In an interview in his office last evening, Santorum said he "pleaded" with administration officials to develop and launch a strategy to convey the issue's importance to the public immediately, and even to forgo Christmas breaks to ensure that a plan was in place.

But the White House preferred to wait until Bush's State of the Union address Feb. 2, a strategy that made it difficult for GOP senators to build support for Social Security changes among their constituents, Santorum said.

Foes of the reforms "didn't waste" the holiday breaks, he said. "They started hammering on the president, basically starting to tear this apart in December. What [the White House] needed to do immediately was what they did three months later, which was to lay out the problem and get ahead of the curve.

"It's the old thing in politics: You either define your opponent or your opponent defines you, and we sat back and let our opponents define us and define the issue," he said. "We were just playing catch up the whole time, and that was the fundamental error."

Santorum's remarks were in the context of new Social Security legislation that he plans to introduce today that he hopes will allay some of the public's trepidation about changes to the Social Security system.

His Social Security Guarantee Act would essentially write into law that any Social Security system changes would not affect benefits of any American 55 or older. The act would require Social Security officials to send a written guarantee of benefits to each individual born before 1950 who is eligible for the program.

Though Santorum acknowledged that the bill is a small step that does not address Social Security's shortfall, which the system trustees expect to be nearly $4 trillion over 75 years, he said he hoped that his measure could help reopen dialogue on the issue, and he thought it was legislation that both Democrats and Republicans could accept.

The Social Security system surplus is expected to run out by 2041, but by 2017, there will be less revenue coming into the system from taxes than the amount needed to pay benefits to recipients.

Santorum is a longtime proponent of allowing younger workers to create personal accounts within the Social Security system that would be invested in a blend of stocks and bonds. It is a proposal that Republicans believe could give younger workers a better return than the current Social Security benefit, but one that Democrats see as privatizing the system and causing financial risk for future retirees.

Santorum has not signed on to one specific plan yet, saying that, as chairman of the conference committee and the Finance Committee's social security subcommittee, he must be open to all ideas.

Even Republicans have said it highly unlikely that Social Security reform will get any congressional action this year. Bush met with his Commission on Social Security yesterday, and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Social Security "remains a priority," but added that the top White House priorities now are Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Santorum said he was continuing to getting mixed signals from House GOP leaders about whether they will move on reform legislation in the near future.

"The vast majority of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle -- obviously, all of them on the other side of the aisle, and some of them on my side of the aisle -- are just saying, 'Well, this is not the politically best thing to do to talk about this issue; let's just wait until the crisis hits us between the eyes and then let [lawmakers then] deal with it.' I just think that's irresponsible," Santorum said. "I didn't come here to dodge problems."

Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said that even if Santorum is distancing himself from the White House tactics, he was not disavowing the substance of the administration goal to change Social Security, which Singer said would result in benefit cuts to younger workers to close the system's funding gap.

"Social Security benefits are already guaranteed; that's the way the program works," Singer said. "He can dress it up any which way he likes; the fact of the matter is he's still trying to create a situation where benefits get cut."