RUSH: Tuesday night, Newsmax.com CEO Chris Ruddy interviewed Clinton. Ruddy said, “Do you think President Obama was smart to come out with a proposal that he knew was just totally unacceptable to the Republicans at a time when the country really is desperate for compromise?”

CLINTON: This whole thing is a little confusing. The speech that the president gave to Congress — you know, he didn’t propose any new taxes — I personally don’t believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending, either one, ’til we get this economy off the ground. This has been a dead, flat economy, and the — you don’t want in something this flat, if we cut government spending, which I would normally be inclined to do when the deficit’s this big, with interest rates already near zero, you can’t get the benefits out of it.

RUSH: Then he went on to nuke Obama’s class warfare thing.

CLINTON: We don’t have a lot of resentment against people who are successful. We kind of like it, Americans do. It’s one of our best characteristics, that if we think someone earned their money fairly, we do not resent their success. Americans lost the fact that whatever you think about this millionaire surcharge, I don’t really care because I would pay it, but it won’t affect me because I already pay the minimum income ’cause I live in New York. I’ll pay more, but it won’t solve the problem.

RUSH: So there’s Clinton again reminding everybody he’s in the top bracket, reminding everybody he’s rich. (imitating Clinton) “Hey, I’ll be glad to pay that top rate, doesn’t matter to me, but it isn’t gonna solve the problem.” It isn’t gonna solve the problem. I don’t care, I don’t care if he used to use the same lines. We’re talking about liberals and we’re talking about a presidential campaign, and we’re talking about a former president here who has just willingly stabbed the sitting president of the United States in the back. I don’t care that Clinton believes everything Obama believes and has said it in the past. What’s happening here — and I don’t know how wide a berth this is gonna get, but he said it. He’s basically throwing Obama under the bus, tax increase won’t solve the problem, none of what Obama’s doing is gonna solve the problem, and we don’t resent the rich. (imitating Clinton) “Hey, I am the rich, you know, I’m one of you now, I pay it, I pay more than everybody else. I live in New York, ha-ha-ha.” That’s not very smart, but still. It is what it is.

Then here’s Mark Penn last night on Hardball, Chris Matthews, Mark Penn, Clinton’s pollster, former Hillary strategerist. Matthews said, “What’s the right prescription, go down the middle left, go a little bit over to the progressive side, go after the rich people, what’s your prescription here?”

PENN: This is a time to go to the center the way Bill Clinton did. This is the time not to bring, you know, divisiveness particularly for President Obama who got unprecedented support. He got half of the 26% that earn over a hundred thousand dollars in this country along with the overwhelming votes from those making under $30,000. He has to bring those groups together the way he did in the last presidential election, and this is the wrong way to do that.

RUSH: Right. Now, these guys are not economic experts, let me just say that, and Bill Clinton is not an economic expert. Folks, I’m not analyzing whether Clinton’s right or wrong in what he’s saying. It’s not the point. The point is who he’s saying it about now. We just did escape beyond the realm of Newsmax. But if it weren’t for Newt and the congressional Republicans who won the House back in 1994 forcing Clinton’s hand, he would never have cut taxes, there woulda never been any welfare reform. That is what gave us the so-called Clinton recovery. If there hadn’t been any tax cuts in the eighties from Reagan there would have been a nineties boom.

There’s not a dime’s worth of difference when you get down to practical matters between Clinton and Obama, but Clinton thinks there is right now. This is not exactly a ringing endorsement for the sitting president who’s now basing his entire reelection on class envy, taxing the rich, and Clinton’s out there undercutting every bit of it. And he’s, what, the godfather, he’s the elder statesman, titular head, whatever you want, of the Democrat Party. To me that’s the relevance of this. Then you got Mark Penn who’s also said this last week, I think he wrote it somewhere, so there are elements in the Democrat Party piling on Obama.