Raising Arizona, McCain and Goldwater
After Super Tuesday, John McCain told local supporters they were “a little bit closer to the day when mothers in Arizona might be able to tell their children that someday they could grow up to be president of the United States.”
That wry comment has a history with relevance to McCain’s situation today. Since Arizona became a state in 1912, the only other resident to win nomination for President was Barry Goldwater, who in 1964 lost to Lyndon Johnson by a crushing margin.
His defeat reflected both the mistrust of “extremism” at that time and the emergence of a conservative movement that culminated in Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and is now in crisis after George W. Bush’s two terms to start the new century.
As McCain moves toward becoming the second Arizonan to make a run for the White House, his candidacy reflects that history and raises questions about that other turning point in Republican history.
Goldwater aroused the fears of his party that he was too conservative. McCain is facing doubts over whether he is conservative enough.
Their Arizona temperaments are part of the equation–plain-spoken, proud and independent. Goldwater was just as mistrusted by the Eastern Republican Establishment of his time as McCain now is by the Evangelical Base today.
Will his fate be different?
Cross-posted from my blog.
7 Responses to “Raising Arizona, McCain and Goldwater”
1. You were correct to put the word “extremism” in quotes, because about Goldwater, that word was a scummy lie.
2. McCain is hardly any kind of Goldwater, and 2008 is not analogous in any way to 1964.
Most readers probably know already that evangelicals (many of whom continue to support Huckabee) are not the main group opposed to McCain, much less the only ones. [sigh]
DLS-
Goldwater was extreme for the '60's, which is why LBJ won the '64 election in a landslide. He wanted to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, which is pretty radical.
Goldwater would be considered moderate today.
Goldwater was the subject of innumerable slimy attacks by those who loathed any challenge to the domination of modern New Deal welfare-state, bureaucratic-elite liberalism and the Democratic Party at the time.
He was subject to vicious attacks as well as appeals to emotion of the vote-bought. For example: Will dinosaur Schorr ever admit he was wrong, and apologize to Goldwater posthumously. (No wonder he's featured on NPR!)
http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2001/daniel-s…
In all fairness, there's an interesting aspect to McCain as Goldwater here, notably in the reader remarks, for Hillary Clinton has already demonstrated in the previous decade that she's the next Nixon (worse, already, in fact).
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conse…
More on Goldwater here. This is not McCain, no straight or inverse analogy.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28337.html
1964 indeed was, as the title of one book puts it, “Liberalism's Last Hurrah.”
The New Deal won, and we got the Great Society, unrest, riots, and a degradation of leftism and liberalism once radicalism took hold that has stained the Democrats since then and wrought failures which were why Reagan won in 1980. The Left has been reactionary as well as resentful ever since. The hatred of Bush is mentally ill but there was plenty of hatred for Reagan as well. Hopefully some have learned by then. The Clintons tried to lurch left after election in 1992 and faced the 1994 elections as a reply from the US public. The resulting “Third Way” was mere incrementalism or a “half-a-loaf” version of what they would have preferred, and if there were no public or conservative opposition, they would have tried going even farther left. (Some folks never learn!)
DLS- The unrest and riots were due to an unpopular war and the civil rights movement. Don't forget Goldwater voted against the 1964 Voting Rights Act. He was no moderate.