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It’s been over 40 years, so my memory needs some help. I went here and got this:

http://wikibin.org/articles/george-wallace-presidential-campaign-1968.html

“Wallace ran a “law and order” campaign similar to that of the Republican former Vice President, Richard Nixon. Nixon himself worried that Wallace might steal enough votes to give the election to the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Some Democrats feared Wallace’s appeal to blue-collar workers and union members (who usually vote Democratic) would hurt Humphrey in Northern states like Ohio, New Jersey, and Michigan.

Wallace’s campaign rhetoric became infamous, such as when he pledged to run over any demonstrators who got in front of his limousine and asserted that the only four letter words that hippies did not know were w-o-r-k and s-o-a-p. He accused Humphrey and Nixon of wanting to radically desegregate the South. Wallace said, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties.” His campaign in California and other states attracted the interest of the far right, including the John Birch Society.”

As I remember,(I headed up the George Wallace student campaign in my junior high elections project) Wallace said, on welfare, that it was one thing to help somebody who was too old or too sick to work, but everybody else needed to get a job.

I can also recall the constant remarks about the liberals and intellectuals in their ivory towers. IIRC, Spiro Agnew started aping Wallace on some of this. Again, IIRC, Wallace railed against big money and big business. I’ll try to find cites to something more than, “He was a Populist”, which there is plenty of.

So, lets see:

1) Strong defense
2) No welfare for the able bodied
3) More state rights than Federal power
4) Limit what the Federal government can do

So, that seems pretty “conservative”. Now I need to find where he blasted banks and the rich.

parsy, who is old enough to remember the AUH2O bumper stickers.

Here’s some more, but I am trying to find some specific Wallace quotes or speeches about the working man and middle class against the elites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism

George Wallace, Four-Term Governor of Alabama, led a populist movement that carried five states and won 13.5% of the popular vote in the 1968 presidential election. Campaigning against intellectuals and liberal reformers, Wallace gained a large share of the white working class vote in Democratic primaries in 1972.[69][70][71]

Populism continues to be a force in modern U.S. politics, especially in the 1992 and 1996 third-party presidential campaigns of billionaire Ross Perot. The 1996, 2000, 2004, and the 2008 presidential campaigns of Ralph Nader had a strong populist cast. The 2004 campaigns of Dennis Kucinich[72][73][74][75] and Al Sharpton also had populist elements. The 2004 and 2008 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has been described by many[76] (and by himself) as a “one economic community, one commonwealth”[76] populist.

Comparison between earlier surges of populism and those of today are complicated by shifts in what are thought to be the interests of the common people. Jonah Goldberg and others argue that in modern society, fractured as it is into myriad interest groups and niches, any attempt to define the interests of the “average person” will be so general as to be useless.[citation needed]

parsy, who says this is just the way things still are among a lot of Southerners. We can’t stand Big Banks, etc.

I need to buy this book, I guess. But it dovetails with what I have been saying on FR for years. Conservatives have become way too influenced by Libertarians in economic issues to the point where the “populist” roots have been forgotten:

The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Paperback

Carter also provides great detail into minds of the inner circle of those men who managed Wallace’s candidacy in his state and later national campaigns for President, including talented speechwriter but also violent racist Klansman Asa Carter (no relation to the author), who would later become famous as the author of the historical novel that inspired the Clint Eastwood movie “The Outlaw Josey Wales”. Biographer Carter’s premise is that by Wallace’s strong showings in the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972 (before he was derailed by an assassination attempt) that Wallace succeeded in moving the national political debate to the right, especially in the area of social policies and politics. Carter has gone on record in other books and speeches as trying to link the Republican policies of welfare reform, re-examination of affirmative action policies and anti-crime legislation as being directly descended from Wallace’s bigoted early campaigns. While I think he stretches the point I do think that some of Wallace’s populist appeal did pave the way for successful Presidential campaigns of other southerners, such as Georgia’s Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Arkansas’ Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Carter sees Republican Ronald Reagan as more of a direct descendant of Wallace, but this reviewer sees it as a fact that most successful Presidential races since 1968 whether Republican or Democrat have taken Wallace’s anti-Washington bureaucrat populist rhetoric and support for a stronger defense and lower taxes as being more important than his racial stances.

Of course Wallace himself moderated his racial stances through the succeeding years, until he was running as a populist with appeal to both blacks and whites in the 1980’s and appealing for forgiveness to many of those he had wronged. Carter dutifully reports this later conversion, although he seems to question some of the sincerity behind the public conversion.

parsy, who will hold off now until he can find some speeches, etc.