Conservative commentator and columnist Pat Buchanan predicted that if President Barack Obama goes after the "400 billionaires" at the top of the financial community with calls for new taxes, "that's going to have popular appeal" with the middle class.
He made the remarks on Monday's
Laura Ingraham Show. She said that Obama would use his State of the Union address to go populist by promoting wealth redistribution.
The idea that the middle class has been left out of the recovery does have resonance, Buchanan said. He would help the middle class by imposing tariffs on imported goods to bring back domestic manufacturing and eliminating taxes on small businesses.
Buchanan warned that the "donor class" would try to anoint a Republican presidential nominee. For now, the 2016 race is wide open with the campaign focused on middle class concerns, stagnating wages, what's happened to the American Dream, and who can bring it back, said Buchanan.
"If you have an agenda, if you have something the American people are interested in, if you can reach the middle class, and the working class folks, and the populist folks, and the people who believe in traditional values, you can articulate an agenda that is credible, and you can go out there and defend it passionately, you can break through in these primaries," said Buchanan.
"To the degree that the donor class controls the party," he said, "it's going to lose its fire in its base and it's real passion and energy."
Buchanan told Ingraham that Americans are not hankering to get involved in military conflicts overseas. The Republican Party will not gain traction if it runs on a platform of confronting Iran, because Americans have no stomach for war, he said.
On executive amnesty, he predicted that at the end of the day Congress will not be able to repeal Obama's amnesty policies. The House may block funding for the Department of Homeland Security, but even if such a bill gets through the Senate, the president will veto it.
"The Republican Party is not going to shut down the Department of Homeland Security," Buchanan said, and that means "executive amnesty will not be repealed in this Congress,"
Breitbart reported.
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