Member-only story
The Price of the American Dream
There are $1.5 trillion in student loans guaranteed by Uncle Sam!
Sen. Willard “Mitt” Romney (R-UT), when he was running for president, had a stump speech generally accessible to the plebes. There was one point, though, that I could not follow no matter how many times I heard that speech or how much I thought about it. It was clear that Gov. Romney (as we called him from his last held office at the time, governor of Massachusetts) thought he had an applause line, but the result was always crickets.
He would spend a verbal paragraph throwing blows at President Obama for cutting banks out of administration of the federal student loan programs. Then came the promise to reverse Obama’s move and the futile pause for applause.
I scanned the newspapers. I directly queried every Republican I could buttonhole, which was quite a few. I remain at this time ignorant of the public policy button Gov. Romney was trying to push. As was every audience I saw him address on TV. As was every Republican I was able to query on the campus of a first rate university with a highly ranked business school.
Every time I tried to gin up a conversation with a person on the faculty I took to be a Republican, I came away with more impressions than facts. I had the impression that they thought Obama was wrong to cut the banks out of the process…
