Support Our GOP Chairman By Chris Buck, Esq.

Chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party is the hardest job in NH politics. Former Chairman John Sununu compared it to being Governor, and said the Chairman's job was much harder. Chairmen frequently spend tens of thousands of dollars of their own money, their businesses suffer, and their families suffer. And they perform this selfless task out of love for their party, but generally, all they receive is criticism. Regardless of who is in office, after the ballots are cast in January, we have an obligation to look past our differences and unify for the good of the party. Infighting is not a new phenomenon. But we must not let it divide the New Hampshire Republican Party at this important time. The dirty secret of party politics is that disagreements are generally not about ideologies, they are about who controls the party, who is in power. In the Republican Party, calling a person a "RINO" is used nearly as often to say "I don't like that person," as it is to express an ideological difference. And some of the biggest fiascoes in the last half year have been about people not getting along with other people, plain and simple. But there are also those who have worked quietly to undermine the Chairman, either by signaling to big donors to withhold donations from the party, leaking confidential information, and reporting inaccuracies to the media. To those people, the quiet detractors of the NH Republican Party, I implore you to stop. If you continue to seek to tear down the Chairman, you will tear down the party. You will hand our party over to our true opponents, those who would impose the failed liberal Democratic policies of the past. We cannot have a battle where both sides (however they are defined) are prepared to destroy the other at all costs. The idiocy of that course should be apparent to any good Republican - it is cutting off one's nose to spite their face. And lest either side be mistaken, there is no such thing as a victory in this battle. Resignation or no resignation, as long as factions within the Republican Party are at war with each other, we all lose. If our Chairman resigns or is coerced into doing so, a large faction of the State Republican Party goes with him. Some of those people will become independents, others may join up as conservative Democrats, others will leave politics never to return, and there will be those who will join the TEA Party. Throughout the course of party politics, we have seen numerous establishment vs. anti-establishment battles, yet we never seem to learn that we are simply in a newer version of the same cycle. The activists eventually become the establishment, and they then give way to a newer version of themselves. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism

runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs." In the current re-animation of the old schism, perhaps we have a chance to realize that our current Chairman is not the problem. He does not face any challenge that has not been faced and dealt with before, and will not at some point in the future be dealt with by a future Chairman. 574 Words