Page 4 — THE LACONIA DAILY SUN, Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Pat Buchanan
Is Obama shaping a new political majority? In the 20th century, only two presidents shaped new governing coalitions that outlasted them. They were the only two men to appear on five national tickets. The first was FDR, who rang down the curtain in 1932 on the seven decades of Republican hegemony since Abraham Lincoln that had seen only two Democrats in the White House. And Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson had made it only because of divisions inside the GOP. Franklin Roosevelt would win four terms, and his party would win the presidency in seven of nine elections between 1932 and 1968. Richard Nixon was the next craftsman of a governing coalition. While he won with only 43 percent in 1968, by 1972 he had cobbled together a New Majority that would give the GOP four victories in five elections between 1972 and 1988. In two of those victories, Nixon and Ronald Reagan would roll up 49-state landslides. Roosevelt and Nixon both employed the politics of conflict and confrontation, not conciliation, to smash the old coalition. Find me something to veto, Roosevelt once said to his aides, seeking to start a fight with his adversaries to rally his grumbling troops. “They hate me, and I welcome their hatred,” said FDR in the 1936 campaign. He believed that if a slice of the electorate was incorrigibly hostile, one ought not appease or court them, but use them as a whipping boy to rally the majority. With FDR, the foil was Wall Street, the “money-changers in the temple of our civilization.” With Nixon it was urban rioters and campus anarchists and their academic apologists and elite enablers, and the demonstrators who blocked troop trains and carried Viet Cong flags as they chanted: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! The NLF Is Going to Win!” In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Southern conservative Democrats and Northern Catholics and ethnics left the party of their fathers in droves to join The New Majority of Richard Nixon, which they saw as representing their values and standing for peace with honor. Barack Obama seems to be taking a page out of the playbook of these coalition builders. Since re-election, he has been actively seeking out confrontations to drive wedges through the Republican Party. “Positive polarization,” it was once called. Rather than do a deal with Speaker John Boehner and offer one-for-one budget cuts for tax hikes, the president forced congressional Republicans into a humiliating climb-down and public retreat that split the House majority asunder. Then he spiked the football to rub it in, saying he had made good on his pledge to make the rich pay.
While Obama declined to do battle for his favorite for State, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, a battle that would have united Republicans, he has chosen to do battle for Chuck Hagel for Defense. As Hagel is a conservative Republican, this has already divided the GOP foreign policy realists from the neocons and the War Party. If Hagel is confirmed, Republican resistance will have been routed. If Hagel is rejected, the Republican Party will be damaged in the eyes of many for having trashed a patriot, war hero and friend of veterans who put America first and wanted no more unnecessary wars. Nixon lost the first two battles he waged to put a Southern jurist on the Supreme Court, then castigated the Senate for perpetrating acts of “regional discrimination,” and went on to win all 11 states of the Confederacy in 1972. It’s called winning by losing. Obama’s selection of White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew for Treasury secretary, a former budget director whose intransigence in negotiations antagonized Hill Republicans, looks to be another fight the president is picking to portray the GOP as obstructionists who cannot accept the verdict of 2012. The president is also taking a nonegotiations stance on the debt ceiling, saying he refuses to pay ransom to the GOP to prevent their destroying the nation’s credit rating. Republicans would do well to walk this terrain before choosing to fight upon it. The coming gun battle, too, is one in which Obama seems to be seeking a clash where, should he lose on the assault weapons ban, he wins with the public and tars Republicans as lapdogs of the National Rifle Association. And the next time a massacre occurs, as inevitably it will, is there any doubt whom the Democrats will hold responsible? The president has many weapons in his coming clashes with the congressional Republicans. He has the presidency itself, the bully pulpit. He has forums like the Inaugural Address and State of the Union that Republicans cannot match. He has a press that deeply dislikes the Republican right and serves as his echo chamber. And while the White House speaks with a single voice, the Republican Party is a cacophony of voices. With demography moving against the GOP, with more and more Americans becoming dependent upon government, it will take leadership not yet visible to rescue the Republican Party from the fate Barack Hussein Obama has in store for it. (Syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan has been a senior advisor to three presidents, twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.)
LETTERS Please keep $5 to $10 in your pocket for small, local purchases To the editor, Most of you don’t realize the impact you have on a small business, or any business, each time you use your credit or debit card. Credit card uses, is at an all time high. Together with the customer charges and merchant fees we pay, they are the ones getting wealthy. Just an unknown fact for you the consumer to know: Ever think about how the card companies can give you all that money back, or extra mileage? Well, wonder no longer. The money comes out of the merchant you gave your card to, to purchase the item you bought. Yes that’s right. Each month we receive a bill for charge made. Each credit card company has a different rate they charge us. Each card it self has a different charge associated with it, depending on the type of card it is. We pay the credit card companies over $2,000 a year in fees, for you to have the privilege of using your credit card. I called the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office on Nov. 15 to verify the legality of a charge Laconia City Hall is charging you to use your credit card for any payment. The law has changed, and businesses CAN CHARGE YOU, if you choose to use a credit card for payment. We, at My Coffee House, and many other small businesses in Laconia have begun to ask for a minimum purchase of just $5. By doing this, you help make the transaction less costly. We have asked our customers when shopping at local small businesses, try to keep just $ 5 to $10 in your pocket. The impact this will have on the economy is stagger-
ing. With the use of paying just $5 to $10 CASH for your purchase, YOU could save us $ 2000. What do we do with this saving? First of all, we save YOU money right back by not having to raise our prices to pay for those card company fees. Second, we invest in our own dedicated people by giving them better pay. This would stimulate their buying locally. Third, by having more disposable income, our employees and YOU can invest in the local economy, and strengthen every business in your shopping area. Forth, by having more working capital, we and other business can hire new employees. We can invest in our own businesses by hiring other businesses to do work for us. NOTE: We were able to hire a local young man to create a “My Coffee House” sign for our building. By having the exposure of our sign, he was able to get several jobs right here in our community from just our investing in HIM. WOW! This is PEOPLE helping PEOPLE, $5 to $10 at a time. That’s all it will take! Let’s stop giving the credit card companies our hard earned income, and reinvest into our own local people. We are a small, local, family company with strong family values. YOU can make such a difference in your own community. John Morin My Coffee House Member of BIBA Laconia
We should all guard against making reprehensible statements To the editor, While Don Ewing writes provocative letters from a very specific point of view, he has, in my opinion, stepped over a line of humane expression in his latest letter to the editor (“Elites Protect Themselves”). Regardless of one’s politics (and mine are well known) or position on gun control proposals, I find Mr. Ewing’s statement that “politicians are allowing gun violence and sacrificing people, like the children in Newtown, to promote the political elite’s goal of controlling the American people” to be an unconscionable accu-
or integrity. Our country and its policy makers are in the midst of a critical conversation about the presence of guns in our society. The kind of vitriol that Mr. Ewing writes adds nothing to that conversation and, rather, makes a mockery of serious efforts to thoughtfully consider this issue. All of us have a constitutionally protected right to speak our minds. But, as individuals, we should guard against making reprehensible statements that taint the conversation and demean the subject with their utter perversity. Kate Miller