Posted on 03/22/2015 11:44:26 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will announce Monday that he is launching his campaign to become the 2016 Republican nominee for president. Cruz has been positioning for this nomination almost since he entered the upper chamber in 2012. His announcement takes place at a bastion of conservatism, Liberty University, the institution founded by evangelical leader Jerry Falwell.
Cruz is going to run from the right. He has spent much of his short career in Washington blasting the "mushy middle" of his party (which might be news to most Democrats) which he dismisses as a "failed electoral strategy."
During a recent visit to New Hampshire, where he vowed to eliminate the Department of Education and the Internal Revenue Service, Cruz said that "I'm pretty sure, here in New Hampshire, y'all define gun control like we do in Texas: gun control is when you hit at what you aim at."
Fifty years ago another Republican senator ran this kind of campaign, Arizona's Barry Goldwater, who took on President Lyndon Johnson. Cruz will test the conventional wisdom that Goldwater's strategy was and remains a failure.
When Republicans voted to nominate him in 1964, Goldwater told the delegates that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice no virtue." When the icon of moderate Republicans, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, spoke to the convention the delegates hissed and booed.
The outcome was far from great for the GOP. Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide election that brought in huge liberal Democratic majorities which passed the exact programs that conservatives abhorred....
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
How did a non-commie survive those dorm days, anyhow?
Ronald Reagan.
“Fifty years ago another Republican senator ran this kind of campaign”.
We live in totally different times today and fight a far worse “enemy” in the White House. Who would ever believed that our country would be run by Muslims and a gaggle of other communists, fascists and the like? Even the old democrats would not have supported what is being cast down upon us today. Granted they had different views of what we needed back then but they sure as hell would be fighting against what we see today.
Vietnam wasn't an issue in 1964.
I could play better guitar than them. By a lot.
The college administrations had not been co-opted into the witch hunts in those days. They were 99.44% liberal, but the admin and the faculty were led by the WWII and Korea generations, of whom most had served a hitch somewhere, somehow. There were no "speech codes"; there was no one to tattle to. Political grading by corrupt profs was almost unheard-of.
There was chatter about politics, and a few "identity studies" courses you could take to protect you from hard grading if you had been admitted for racial or other quota purposes. But there was no homo politics to speak of.
Disciplinary actions weren't for "creating a hostile environment" with your thought patterns. They were for destroying college property or getting into fights after hockey games. The real focus was on grades, girls, IM sports, and beer. In retrospect, a focus on God, grades, sports, and real music would have been preferable. Okay, some beer as well. And girls, if they weren't imported into the dorms.
It was. This one-line joke was told a year or two later by an elementary-school buddy of mine:
"Do you realize that if Goldwater had been elected, we'd be bombing Hanoi?"
(Johnson had started his escalation and bombing shortly after the election.)
Yes, it was an issue a year or two later than 1964.
Yes, it was an issue a year or two later than 1964.
What I'm saying is that the Johnson people were indeed using Vietnam as an issue during the 1964 campaign—warning that Goldwater would be too aggressive there. Goldwater, as an anti-Communist, was saying we should fight the Communists in Vietnam as if we meant it, and bomb all the NVA's assets and factories and win the darn thing—instead of pussy-footing around, McNamara style. The Johnson people were saying that this was crazy stuff, that the man is a war-monger. Hence the joke—Johnson started escalating in Vietnam, after saying only a lunatic like Goldwater would do that. Reminds you of Woodrow Wilson's campaign slogan for the election of 1916, after his first term: "He kept us out of war!"
For the '64 election, the Dems framed out their usual position, promising to confront Communist aggression in a nuanced manner by not confronting it. Another element of the campaign was how Goldwater would deal with the Soviet Union itself—asserting that he would get us into nuclear war with his belligerence. I'm sure you remember hearing about the famous anti-Goldwater TV ad showing a girl holding a flower in a field, and then cutting to a mushroom-cloud explosion—warning that Goldwater's extremism would be responsible for atomizing little chirrens and their flowers.
Ted just needs to come across as a nice, trustworthy guy in the process of ripping them a new one. Reagan did it effectively and won going away. I think Cruz can as well. The socialist and communists in both the Republican and Democrat parties are going to scream bloody murder and how Cruz is a puppy killer and causes rain on the weekends the same way they did Reagan and he just needs to go there you go again...
It most certainly was though not to the extent it was to become when we got so totally involved. But even if you were correct, the point I was making was that Johnson, like Democrats Wilson and FDR before him, ran as the "peace" candidate when all the while he was planning on getting us more deeply involved militarily in Vietnam.
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