Published: March 25, 2008 10:54 am         

Clinton stumps for Clinton

America’s 42nd president visits Logansport

President Bill Clinton has many reasons why his wife should become the next president of the United States, but perhaps the one that resonated most with more than 500 people in Logansport Monday was the simplest he offered.

“You need to vote for somebody that’s not going to forget what you look like tonight,” Clinton said. “You need to remember that the only thing you are, for a brief moment in time, is the most fortunate public servant on the face of the earth.

“If you forget that, the consequences can be devastating. All you need to do is look at Bush’s second term.”

Throughout an hourlong speech, punctuated by roaring cheers from the partisan audience on hand, Clinton outlined the ways his wife, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton, would work to create energy independence, grow jobs, address the foreclosure crisis and restore America’s standing on the world stage.

What Bill Clinton didn’t do, however, was launch any frontal attacks on his wife’s primary opponent, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. He instead kept the focus on why he believed Hillary was the candidate with the best chance to win in November.

“I’ve never met anybody as good as she is at looking at a problem and making it better for other people,” he said.

“She has certainly been tested. If you ever doubted she has the courage and grit to be president, you know it now,” he said, drawing loud cheers. “She’s been in the public spotlight for 15 years, and taken all the criticism. They don’t have anything else to say to her.”

And even Republicans, he said, end up liking Hillary — in spite of themselves.

In upstate New York, majorities in 40 counties voted for Bush in the 2004 presidential election, he said. But when Hillary ran for Senate, she took 60 percent of the popular vote in those same counties.

Recent polls show her ahead of the presumed Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, in Ohio, a state no Democrat has ever lost and gone on to the presidency. Obama was trailing McCain in the same poll, the former president said.

Indiana, he said, is the key. A win in the Hoosier state, on the back of a big win in Pennsylvania, will mean more big wins in West Virginia and Kentucky.

“In a very real sense, Indiana may hold the fate of this country in its hands,” he said.

The president’s swing through Indiana Monday coincided with a major new initiative Hillary Clinton is proposing to deal with the foreclosure crisis threatening as many as 2 million homeowners.

Unlike regular banks, mortgage lenders haven’t been subject to the consequences of risky lending practices, thanks to the practice of repackaging mortgage loans as securities to be traded like stocks, Bill Clinton said.

When the wave of foreclosures started and the value of mortgage-backed securities tanked, mortgage lenders were forced to raise variable interest rates and monthly payments to stay solvent.

“All people think about when they take out a mortgage is simple: Can I make the monthly payment?” Clinton said. “Nobody told them they would have their mortgage basically put on a roulette wheel.”

Hillary’s proposal is a 90-day moratorium on all foreclosures, and a five-year freeze on the monthly payments being made by homeowners with “subprime” mortgages who are still able to make those payments.

The cost of subsidizing those payments — estimated at $30 billion for five years, would be small compared to the cost of a full-blown foreclosure meltdown, the former president said.

“You need somebody who understands this,” he said. “The foreclosure rate is the highest it’s been in 40 years. And if housing prices drop another 15 percent, a third of all Americans have more in their houses than they’re worth. This is a serious problem.”

That brought the former president around to the positive hallmark of his presidency, the economy of the 1990s, which saw inflation-adjusted incomes for working families rise for the only time in 30 years.

“The press is just now saying that it looks like we’re headed for a recession,” Clinton said. “Most Americans I’ve talked to think we’ve been in a recession for quite some time.”

That comment drew perhaps the biggest cheer of the evening.

“We all know why: Incomes are flat and costs are exploding,” he said. “What caused this was the trickle-down economy, a failed economic theory ... the reason we study history is that we don’t want to make the same mistake twice. Well, in this case, we’ve already made the same mistake twice, so we don’t want to make it a third time.”

When it comes to putting the nation back on firm economic footing, Clinton argued, Hillary Clinton “is more conservative than George Bush.”

Her key initiative as president, he said, will be to end tax breaks to the big oil companies and use that revenue to create a national initiative, on par with the space race of the 1960s, to create national energy independence.

“You cannot increase incomes unless we create jobs and tighten the labor market,” he said. “And the best way to grow jobs is to make a serious commitment to energy independence.”

Renewable energy and the creation of affordable cars that run at 150 miles per gallon would be the hallmarks of the program, which Clinton said is possible if the country commits the same resources it once did to space flight.

Finding those resources without further national indebtedness will require a draw down in Iraq, with Hillary Clinton’s caveat that forces must remain in the region — in northern Iraq near the Turkish border and in Afghanistan — to deal with ongoing threats from extremists.

Creating a national health-care system that insures all Americans, “and makes it illegal to charge you an arm and a leg when you get sick,” is another part of what Hillary Clinton sees as maximizing national resources, the former president said.

With his wife’s national health-care plan, he said, the nation would spend $200 billion a year less on health care, most of which is now going to “overhead” for insurers and health-care providers.

And strengthening and enforcing trade laws is another part of the solution, he said, but that will only be possible when the nation stops borrowing so much from the Far East and the oil-producing nations.

“The reason you didn’t hate trade as much when I was president was that we enforced trade laws five times as much as we do now,” he said.

“But you can’t get tough on your banker,” he said, referring to the $4 trillion in national debt racked up since he left office. “If we had not abandoned sound policy for short-term, selfish interests, we’d be out of debt in four or five years.”

But above policy issues, he said, Hillary Clinton has her heart in the right place. Bill Clinton said one of the first things he asked her, after she decided to run, is “How will you know you did a good job if you’re president?”

“She said, “I think I will have done a good job if the American people are better off when I quit than when I started, and the nation is coming together instead of being torn apart,’” he said.

“I believe if she’s elected president, and she can implement her plans on energy, jobs, health care, rebuilding the military and bringing our soldiers home, this country will have more prosperity, more broadly shared, than when I was president. Say yes to her, and say yes to your future.”