RUSH: Now, continuing here with Mrs. Clinton’s economic manifesto. She repeated this. Her plan to freeze home foreclosures and subprime adjustable rate mortgages, a plan some economists believe would raise interest rates on other consumers — it would do worse than that. Freeze home foreclosures and subprime adjustable rate — you’re going to create a new homeless problem, too, because we just learned that in Cleveland the homeless are occupying some of these foreclosed homes, which is an upside to the foreclosure thing, if you’re a liberal. Also describes Clinton’s plan for creating new jobs through investments in infrastructure projects, like roads, bridges, and levees, green-collar jobs that would help reduce dependence on foreign oil. This is right out of the John Edwards playbook, and he went off the cliff — blew up his own campaign with this, and yet both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are heading in that same direction, which I think it’s just an indication that panic is setting in here. And it’s not so much that either of these two candidates are actually going to be able to pull off any of these things were they to be elected president — they might try; they probably wouldn’t succeed. But look at what they think they gotta do to win the Democrat primaries, to get the nomination.
The kind of people that are voting today in the Democrat Party, all this hatred for corporation and profit, corporations and profit that propel the capitalist system. Then there’s this little ditty in the story about Mrs. Clinton’s economic message. After taking a question from a little girl, who told her that she and her mother were about to lose their home because the mortgage payment had jumped too high, Clinton invited the two on stage and put her arm around them. Clinton said that the woman, a hairdresser whose mortgage payment jumped from $600 to $1,000 a month, was in a similar position to many people she had spoken to who had been pushed into adjustable rate loans by unscrupulous mortgage brokers. It’s always the mortgage broker that’s the culprit. It’s never the borrower. The borrower is clean and pure as the wind-driven snow. The borrower is always a victim of the evil loan shark. But did Mrs. Clinton offer to help this little girl and her mom? Did she? Well, the story doesn’t say anything about that. All the story says is that Mrs. Clinton brought the little girl and her mother up there and put her arm around them and the usual, (doing Hillary impression) ‘I talk to people all the time who tell me similar stories.’
It reminded me of an incident that happened — that has to be last summer? Last fall, perhaps. The Breck Girl, still in the campaign, was in New Hampshire. Was doing a town hall meeting. During the town hall meeting, a young woman, a college student, raised her hand and spoke and complained about her student loans, how they had ballooned and she had no chance and no hope of repaying them. And what was Edwards going to do about this? And she was distressed and highly upset. And she was on the verge of tears about this. You know, Edwards did the typical liberal Democrat thing. He shared her tears and shared her pain and then blamed Bush and blamed Republicans and evil lenders and so forth for this horrible circumstance and then essentially said, I’ll fix this for you. And I’m sure that’s the last he ever thought of that little girl.
Well, it wasn’t the last I thought of her, because I’ll tell you what I did. I endeavored to find out who she was. And, by the way, I told Mr. Snerdley, said I’m uncomfortable telling this story. He said you gotta tell it, you gotta tell — these Democrats get away with this stuff all the time. They don’t do diddly-squat. Everybody thinks they’re the ones that really care. You gotta tell this story. I said, Mr. Snerdley, it’s too self-serving. You gotta tell this story. We endeavored to find out who this little student was, what school she went to, and — and our office reached her. And the message to her was that I would retire all of her student loans and any future loans that she made or committed to, provided that she endeavored to keep her GPA up, went to school and all this sort of stuff. All of that happened. After I didn’t say a word about this to anybody, told her not to tell anybody about it, I don’t know if she did or not. The reason that I did it was not to be able to tell you about it someday, because I’m just frosted here watching this, all these Democrats getting all this credit for compassion and caring because these people show up with legitimate problems, and, by the way, college tuition is largely a Democrat problem.
Who the hell runs major institutions of higher learning? Liberals. Who is the majority of people in Congress right now? Liberals. Who is it that’s constantly running around and talking about how big business is screwing the little guy? Liberals. And who is it that’s running around suggesting we need new student loans and we need deductibility for parents of student loans and so forth and greater tuition deductibility, but who is it that’s never talking about how tuition needs to become lower? How come we never hear, like gas prices need to come down, other prices need to — there needs to be about profit. Mrs. Clinton will never talk about taking the profits of Harvard. Mrs. Clinton will never talk about taking the profits of Yale. Mrs. Clinton will never — because they’re in league. The whole point, liberals hang together, keep those tuitions high so these professors, and professor assistants, and all the faculty and all of the presidents, all the administration of these universities continue to get paid very well on the basis of these exorbitant tuitions, plus the cost of books and rooming and lodging and all these things at these major universities. Nobody on the left ever wants to attack the problem. The rising cost of tuition, which has no bearing in people’s ability to pay it, they’re relying on federal subsidies, scholarships, and of course other little gimmicks like the deductibility of tuition, which only encourages colleges to raise tuition.
They never do anything to help the people who are in pain and suffering because of these high tuitions, so I decided to move in there, because this young woman was obviously distressed over this. She had, you know, a little job, she was working two jobs, plus going to school, and she was in a sheer panic over not being able to pay back these loans. Now, some people might say, well, she had no business taking out these loans if she couldn’t afford to pay ’em back. She’s being encouraged to! Everybody in this country is being encouraged to go to college, whether it’s for them or not. They’re being told they got no hope if they don’t go to college. It isn’t for everybody. If you want to go, fine, I’m not condemning it, don’t misunderstand me here, but people being told they got no chance, no prayer, unless they go to college. Some people go to college because they have nothing else to do and don’t know what else they want to do; they hope they’ll find what they want to do when they get there. There’s all kinds of reasons.
But because the impetus — you know, we must educate our children. Yes, we must educate the children, but some people go into bigger debt sending kids to college than they go into debt on their personal credit cards or home mortgages or what have you, depending on how many kids they have. All we talk about in fixing it this, well, we got restructure the student loan program, maybe we forgive the loan payments, maybe we’ll make it up to the university some other way because liberals hang together. So we got together, we found the woman we paid off her loans and further commitments, and then she had to agree, keep GPA up — we don’t do this for nothing, there was an incentive attached to it. We’re not idiots here. And she couldn’t believe it. I didn’t say a thing, you know, we talked to her, didn’t say a thing about Senator Edwards, did you not run anybody else down, we saw the problem, saw her on television, and just — we were distressed that she found herself in this circumstance, but there was a way out.
And here Mrs. Clinton is dragging people up on the stage, exploiting their personal pain to which she might have had some role, in which she might have had some role, because it was Congress that encouraged these loan shark lenders to start making these kinds of loans to people that were not qualified, on the basis they were being frozen out of the American dream and so forth. And now it’s all backfired. I mean there’s nobody’s innocent in this. And yet we’re being told that there’s only one set of guilty people, and that’s the lenders, the evil moneychangers.
Mrs. Clinton and her husband cannot stop talking about how rich they are. Mrs. Clinton and her husband cannot stop talking about how they don’t need a tax cut because they’re wealthy now. They talk about it constantly, and yet here comes a hairdresser and her little girl, and they’re suffering on stage exploited, with Mrs. Clinton’s arms around them doing literally nothing, simply trying to tell the audience, (doing Hillary impression) ‘I’m going to get even with the people who did this to you.’ It’s sort of the same line of thinking, (doing Hillary impression) ‘I’m going to raise taxes on the rich, I’m going to make you feel better that the rich are going to be paying more in taxes.’
(doing voter impression) ‘Mrs. Clinton, is it going to help me?’ Well, no, but you’re going to feel better because you want to hate these people, I’m going to help you get even, you’re going to feel revenge and you’re going to — it’s going to make you feel good. No, it’s not going to help your circumstance. What if Mrs. Clinton had said, you know, this is horrible, I want to help you, my husband and I would like to help you with your mortgage. I know, I know, then people would say but, Rush, then everybody that Mrs. Clinton talks to is going to demand it. No. Maybe they might. But you can deal with it in another way. You can say this is how people work together to help each other out in these situations. Well, Mrs. Clinton doesn’t want that. Mrs. Clinton wants government in charge of making these problems and then supposedly solving these problems because government is where all the compassion and where all the concerns are.
The Hollywood pals of the Clintons could donate, they could set up a trust fund for all of these people with these student loans that are out the wazoo, wouldn’t cover nearly all of them, I know, but you could have a little sliding scale where the people that made the best effort to keep the GPA up, got the help in getting their student loans paid off. Instead of running off to Darfur to find victims over there, instead of running off to Kosovo, instead of running off to all these half-baked places in the world to find suffering and blame the United States for that. Deal with some of the so-called suffering happening in this country that’s been brought on by liberal compassion. And, by the way, Mrs. Clinton, you could also start tipping the waitresses at the diners in Iowa. And if you don’t carry cash, you’re relying on your staff to do it, and if they forget to do it, take on that responsibility yourself. The waitresses, I’m sure, would appreciate a dime or a quarter if it came from you personally, rather than being told that they’re wrong when they report that they did not get a tip.