Giuliani: Goldwater "incompetent, confused and sometimes idiotic"

In my last post, I dealt with how Rudy Giuliani and other Republican Presidential candidates felt about Ronald Reagan. In this one, I will discuss what Giuliani felt about another conservative icon: Barry Goldwater.

As was the case with the Reagan post, I am not arguing that Giuliani should not be elected just because of what he said a number of years ago; I'm arguing that this is further proof that he is no where near a conservative, and that, in many instances, is very hostile to the same people who he needs to win the Presidency.

Giuliani thought Goldwater was an "incompetent, confused and sometimes idiotic man." By extension, he would seem to feel the same way about any one who voted for the Arizona Senator.

In 1964, he felt the Goldwater supporters -- of which Reagan was one -- "succeeded in inflicting a tremendous defeat on the Republican Party."

Giuliani said that Goldwater's biggest challenger in the 1964 primaries, Nelson Rockefeller, characterized "a tradition in the Republican Party [he had] worked hard to re-kindle" -- which is to say the liberal Republican tradition.

In contradistinction to the supposed "tremendous defeat" the '64 election would inflict on the Republican Party, it actually was a tremendous boon. By abandoning the Eastern Establishment Republicans -- led by Rockefeller -- and their "me, too" philosophy, the Republican Party started attracting Southern conservative voters; in fact, of the 6 states Goldwater won, 5 were in the South. (His home state, Arizona, was the exception.)

While some liberal commentators saw the election as a sign that conservatism would never be embraced by the American public, many -- including Newt Gingrich -- saw the fact that five states of the "Solid South" voted Republican as a changing tide in American politics.

When it came to Congressional races, Georgia, like other Southern states, voted Democratic; however, all but one district went for Goldwater. "Newt did a serious analysis of the recent elections in Georgia and came away convinced that Republicans could be elected to Congress," writes Mel Steely. Gingrich did this analysis in 1974.

One of the things that most attracted the people who would later be called "Reagan Democrats," argues Craig Shirley, was that Goldwater picked an equally-conservative running mate. Most Presidential candidates try to balance the ticket, so Goldwater was expected to pick a moderate running mate. By not doing so, he alienated many of the Eastern Republicans, and they sat out the election, one of the reasons Lyndon Johnson won in a landslide.

"But in choosing [William Miller], Mr. Goldwater also began the process of attracting conservative Democrats into the GOP," writes Shirley. One of those people was Ronald Reagan, the former head of Democrats for Nixon, who first registered as a Republican toward the end of 1964.

As the campaign wound down to its final week, Reagan gave a nationally-televised address on behalf of Goldwater: "A Time for Choosing." Lee Edwards has pointed out "that Reagan would not have been given the opportunity to appear on local radio, let alone national TV, if Nelson Rockefeller or any other Republican liberal had been nominated.

What makes that especially important, writes Edwards, is that it was that address that led to California Republicans to ask Reagan to run for Governor.

In short: If there was no Goldwater campaign, there would almost assuredly been no Reagan campaign.

As you can see, Giuliani could not have been more wrong about Goldwater's campaign. It almost directly led to Reagan's victory in 1980. And the complete transformation of the South to GOP territory was made in 1994, when The Contract with America led to Southern voters vote for Congressional Republicans for the first time since FDR.

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In a related topic, it should be pointed out that Gingrich supported Rockefeller in '64, but only for one reason: Rockefeller, felt Gingrich, was the strongest advocate of integration. While Rockefeller was exactly what was wrong with the Republicans and it's doubtful that Gingrich agreed with him on anything else, it's a noble enough reason. That he supported Reagan in '65 shows that Gingrich was not a "Rockefeller-Republican" even when he voted for the New York mayor.

On the same topic, Goldwater was hit over the head for not voting for the Civil Rights Act in '64. But it was not because he was a racist or anything remotely similar to it; in fact, he had voted for similar Civil Rights Acts in 1957 and 1960. He had also pushed for integration of the armed forces two years before Harry Truman.

One of the new editions to the '64, and the part that distressed Goldwater, was Title VII -- which deal with "equal employment opportunity." Though for the idea, the Arizona senator was against the government mandating it. He felt if the government "can forbid such discrimination, it is a real possibility that sometime in the future the same government can require people to discriminate in hiring on the basis of color or race or religion." While that talk was dismissed by those who wanted the bill to pass, it ended up being correct -- eight years after the vote, affirmative action was the law of the land.