BREAKING NEWS: Guess Who's Stumping for Trump!

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Can you believe it? Bill Clinton — yes, ol’ Slick Willie himself — has spoken in support of getting rid of the President. Although he did not name names, his comments can only be regarded as support for Donald Trump. Who could’ve seen this coming?

Doubt me? Here is a verbatim transcript [with one minor edit in brackets] of former President Clinton’s comments to students at the University of California:

“I think how different life looks in the road ahead for you than it did for me when I was your age. Our country is still a great country with so much good in it but we could do so much better.

“Most Americans who played by the rules for the last [four] years have been punished. The average family is working harder, spending less time with their children, paying more for their education and health care. Worried about losing their jobs, worried about the future of this nation.

“In California alone half a million jobs have been lost.

“Your state government is broke and while you’re building more jails, education is being cut and as you well know, tuition is being raised.

“The middle class in this country is declining, the poor increasing. Only the very wealthiest have done better. Your nation has fallen from first to tenth in the world in wages.

“What we got to do now is fight for real change. Change that will require us all to take on interest groups and big government. Change that will require us all to assume more responsibility. Change that will require us to move away from a country in which the top 1% control more wealth than the bottom 90% for the first time since the roaring ’20s.

“Change that will require us all to be one community again, to confront and impose on ourselves higher standards of responsibility, and to listen to one another again instead of just scream at one another. To sit down together, and learn from one another, and honestly try to change ourselves. If we’re going to rebuild America, we’ve got to create more opportunities. We’ve got to require more responsibility. We’ve got to permit more individual choice and strengthen our communities.

“How are we going to do it? I’ll tell you one thing you’ll never do any of it until you change the presidency.”

OK, OK, time now for full disclosure: This is indeed a transcript of Bill Clinton talking to students at Cal, but it is from a campaign speech in 1992. A friend did me the great service of sending me “Confessions of a Corrupt Liberal” from Shasha Stone’s Substack,

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

. Take a look at it. You won’t be sorry. The first video at the beginning of her article is of Clinton speaking to the students. If you need a reminder of just how slick he was, take two minutes to view it.

I was listening to the audio version of Shasha’s article and when I heard Clinton speaking, I was struck by how on-point his comments are today. It is not a perfect parallel but is nevertheless instructive.

Look at his opening: Is there a parent alive today who does not think that the road ahead for their kids is not fundamentally changed (as promised by Obama) from what they experienced? And not changed in a good way, except for parents who might, for example, support the “right” of teachers to secretly convince their kids that they really are a different gender than what their parents and delivering physicians believe, and that they must have a sex-change operation to be happy.

Clinton addressed the 1992 students’ concerns about college costs going up. Well, a middle-class family today struggling to pay UCLA’s estimated $42,127 for one year’s attendance doubtlessly could identify with that. And if they are not California residents, that cost shoots up to $76,327, unless, of course, they are illegal immigrants, in which case they will likely be eligible for in-state tuition in California (and numerous other states).

And in recent years, legislators in blue states have taken to heart Clinton’s urging to spend less on law enforcement with his admonition against “building more jails.” Whooo boy, have they ever!  They have done such a good job implementing that policy that “defunding the police” is now mainstream philosophy in the Democrat party.  But full disclosure: There is a dark cloud on the anti-police horizon – the trend-setting governor of New York has called out the State National Guard to try to keep order in New York City’s subways. Did any of the “defunders” see that one coming?

I must confess to being confused that a Democrat governor would call out the Guard to try to restore order. The editor of The New York Times editorial page was forced out because he had the extraordinary bad judgment to publish an op-ed by a U.S. Senator who recommended that then-President Trump activate the National Guard to restore order when leftists were burning down businesses and killing people. I would think that Governor Hochul would have learned from that episode that using military troops to control crime is a no-no, at least in New York. Similarly, we have been taught that it is bad for the Governor of Texas to use his State Guard to prevent a unprecedented invasion by illegal aliens (Of course I meant “undocumented immigrants and future citizens.”). But in New York, despite these precedents, is it now a good thing to use the Guard to restore order in subways? Is Governor Hochul trying to Make New York Great Again? (pronounced ma-na-ga). I am trying to wrap my head around all this because it seems a bit strange to me, but no doubt our “elites” have a good explanation.

These things are a bit of a tangent from Clinton’s 1992 stump speech, but it just shows that even a man as smart as Clinton couldn’t foresee everything. So back to Clinton and his speech.

I confess that when Clinton spoke, I never knew if he really was a Republican at heart. Could that ambiguity be why he was such a good politician? Think about it: The theme of his speech was set in his second sentence: “Our country is still a great country with so much good in it but we could do so much better.” Look at that: Bill Clinton is saying ‘We’ve got to Make America Great Again.’ I am surprised he didn’t come up with some clever little shorthand acronym for that like, say, “MAGA,” or something similar. But Clinton being a Rhodes scholar and all, he probably was smart enough to foresee that someday “MAGA” would become a curse word when used as either a noun or an adjective, and he knew it would be risky to use that acronym for what he obviously wanted to do.

But like any good advocate, Clinton comes back to his theme again and again.  We’ve got “to listen to one another again instead of just scream at one another.” Clinton, of course, is absolutely right.  That clearly is another endorsement of Trump because we all have seen or heard — and most of us have personally experienced — situations where people who hate Trump or disagree with us about anything political just scream their lungs out as a substitute for rational debate.

YouTube screen grab

And Clinton clearly wants less government control and more emphasis on individual rights and responsibility: “We’ve got to require more responsibility. We’ve got to permit more individual choice and strengthen our communities.” Responsibility?  See, I told you he was endorsing Trump. It is Trump and the Republicans who want criminals arrested and put in jail. Blue strongholds such as New York and California, of course, have different ideas. Individual choice? Well, if you’re talking about a mentally disturbed pre-teen who decides he or she wants to surgically alter their genitalia, I suppose that Biden supports individual choice, as he also does for abortion, although he abandons the last part of Clinton’s formula that it should be “safe, legal and rare.”

But if you want freedom — traditional freedom of speech, freedom to vote for the candidate of your choice, freedom to raise your kids according to your religious beliefs, freedom to own a firearm to protect yourself against criminal gangs and car-jackings, freedom to speak up at school board meetings without being thrown to the floor and arrested by state-sponsored thugs, freedom to engage in peaceful protest against policies the Democrats hold dear, freedom to go to church or operate your family business even during flu season, freedom from having to close your business because the local “leaders” will not enforce criminal laws against robbery and theft . . . in short, the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness free from government control, then the 1992 Bill Clinton may have been speaking to you.

And, of course, Clinton was correct with his conclusion: “You’ll never do any of it until you change the presidency.”