Free Republic

For the past few months, political observers on both the left and right have been comparing Ted Cruz to Barry Goldwater, who lost to Lyndon Johnson by a staggering 434 electoral votes in the 1964 presidential election. The thinking goes like this: Cruz is an unyielding movement conservative, just like Goldwater. Given his strength in the South -- again, just like Goldwater -- he could very well win the Republican nomination. But ultimately Cruz is too extreme to appeal to the broader electorate, and the GOP will suffer an ideological blowout of Goldwater-like proportions in November if it selects the...

Ted Cruz is beginning to surge significantly in the polls in Iowa. Surely the evangelicals in Iowa are the key factor. Already, some of the political pundits are writing him off, likening him to Barry Goldwater, the libertarian-leaning firebrand, who was soundly defeated by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Goldwater lost by a landslide. But, by the same token, Ronald Reagan won by landslides in 1980 and in 1984. And Reagan was perhaps more conservative than Goldwater. The question many are asking about Ted Cruz and his conservative values is: Will he be the new Goldwater or the new Reagan? Reagan...

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s devastating opinions on same-sex marriage and Obamacare, some conservatives are asking themselves: Has America reached the point when we have become like ancient Rome in its final days, all bread and circuses, that we cannot make our way back to the ideas on which we were founded? Do the actual words of the Constitution matter anymore? Should we give up the fight for limited, constitutional government and simply accept that the left has won? Of course not! Conservatives have never been quitters as two of our greatest heroes—Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan—demonstrated when...

Conservative columnist George Will says that Sen. Ted Cruz’s theory for running for the White House — that he can get “more votes from traditional Republican constituencies” — was “slain” by the outcome of the 1964 presidential race and simply doesn’t add up. “The 1964 theory was that many millions of conservatives abstained from voting because the GOP did not nominate sufficiently deep-dyed conservatives,” Mr. Will wrote this week in The Washington Post. “So if in 1964 the party would choose someone like Arizona Barry Goldwater, hitherto dormant conservatives would join the electorate in numbers sufficient for victory.” Mr. Will...

The notable thing about Culture War 4.0 is its consistent rejection of tolerance in favor of government enforced morality. Remember your Muad’Dib: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”  - Ben Domenech, The Federalist  Ed Driscoll succinctly summarizes the emergence of the new liberal fascism in his recent post, and provides an example: REID: I don’t regret that at all. The Koch brothers — no one would help me. They...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was born in 1970, six years after events refuted a theory on which he is wagering his candidacy. The 1964 theory was that many millions of conservatives abstained from voting because the Republican Party did not nominate sufficiently deep-dyed conservatives. So if in 1964 the party would choose someone like Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, hitherto dormant conservatives would join the electorate in numbers sufficient for victory. This theory was slain by a fact — actually, 15,951,378 facts. That was the difference between the 43,129,566 votes that President Lyndon Johnson received and the 27,178,188 that Goldwater got...

Regarding your editorial “The Cruz Candidacy” (March 24): Shades of 1964! For those of us old-timers who worked in the Barry Goldwater camp during that campaign, we see an ominous parallel shaping up because all of the ingredients are there. As ardent conservatives we admired the charismatic retired Air Force general who projected all of our conservative values. Sadly, as history reminds us, he attracted far too few votes from centrist and liberal Republicans, from the independent sector and from middle America in general during the 1964 campaign. This led to one of the worst electoral debacles in our country’s...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.azcentral.com/story/azdc/2015/03/29/ted-cruz-no-barry-goldwater-john-mccain-jeff-flake-say/70579530/

The bronze likeness of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., was unveiled in Statuary Hall Wednesday, becoming the latest addition to the 50-state statue collection in the Capitol. “He earned the nickname ‘Mr. Arizona’ because he had a love affair with our state. It’s magnificent beauty and its freedom loving people. And Arizona loved Barry back, in part because Arizonans saw themselves in him,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said at the ceremony. “Our state never had a better champion than Barry Goldwater. And we’re so very proud that his rich legacy will continue to be honored here at the United...

Link only, due to copyright issues: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/02/10/ted-cruz-vs-elizabeth-warren-presidential-election-column/23192873/

Fifty years ago, on Sept. 7, 1964, a political ad called “Daisy” aired on behalf of President Lyndon Johnson. The commercial opened with a little girl in a meadow, then a horrific nuclear blast filled the screen. We’ve been feeling the fallout ever since. It was only a minute long. The paid ad ran on national television only once, and only on one network, NBC. But that’s all it took.

July, 1964. Fifty years ago this month. The Republican Party nominates Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater for president. The resulting uproar was somewhere north of hysteria. And that was just from the GOP establishment of the day. Followed famously by a November landslide Goldwater “defeat” in which the Arizonan carried a mere five states in his race against Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater was the first conservative Republican to win nomination since the 1924 selection of Calvin Coolidge (the vice president who had succeeded Warren Harding after his death). From 1928 all the way through 1960, every GOP nominee from Hoover...

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." —Barry Goldwater The 50th anniversary of Barry Goldwater's clarion call for liberty acceptance speech for the Republican nomination passed this week. In a modern world where politicians talk, but their words are hollow, listening to Goldwater's message a half a century later is like a drink of fresh water. But the words were no less scary to politicians less than a year from President Kennedy's assassination. The establishment Republicans, then known as Rockefeller Republicans, played...

As with most things, there are good and bad aspects of the Tea Party movement. And all the bad ones were on display March 6 in a speech by Ted Cruz to the Conservative Political Action Conference that replayed every silly thing ever said by conservatives and added some riffs of his own. He began with a mocking refrain about "presidents" Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney (two of them veterans impaired by their trauma), chiding them for not being his kind of conservative. He also asked if we remembered their reigns. Well, we do remember, and we remember...

I haven’t seen the new documentary MITT and I’m not sure I can bring myself to do so. Living in the real-life aftermath of Romney’s failed presidential campaign is depressing enough without sitting through a cinematic autopsy, too. Some say that if this documentary or something like it had been screened before election day, Romney’s chances would’ve improved. Obviously we can’t know that for certain. I feel more confident declaring that had an infamous but little seen Barry Goldwater campaign film called Choice aired in 1964, he still wouldn’t have won. That’s because Goldwater had no chance of winning anyhow....

The U.S. south is “the land of the free, the home of genocide,” civil rights icon Rev. Jesse Jackson repeatedly said Wednesday in a speech that also implied former President Ronald Reagan was a racist. College news outlet Campus Reform provided TheBlaze an audio recording of Jackson telling students at Furman University that Reagan and former presidential candidate Barry Goldwater both sought to sustain segregation. “Goldwater and Reagan – had they been successful, it would have been illegal for blacks and whites to play together on a Saturday afternoon,” he said. “You couldn’t have had the Carolina Panthers behind the...

There are moments in American political history when one of the two major parties finds itself badly out of step with the middle, so beholden to its base that it cannot appeal to the centrist voters who decide most elections. What comes next is a series of predictable steps: Lose a few elections, hit the political equivalent of rock bottom, then turn control of the party over to a relative centrist who can recast the party in a new light. It happened to Republicans when Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) won only six states, and 38.5 percent of the vote, in...

I don’t know why, butt I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Barry lately -- no not this Barry… this one: “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I...

Walt & Lillian Disney with Richard Nixon and his family at Disneyland, 1959 We tend to think of Hollywood as a bastion of leftism, and rightly so. Books like Ron Radosh’s Red Star Over Hollywood demonstrate the deep-seated left-wing dominance of the entertainment industry. Even with the leftism prevalent in Hollywood’s Golden Age, many unabashed conservatives found success without compromising their principles, including one of the most creative minds in the business — Walt Disney.Several biographers and writers that I’ve read have tried to declare that Walt Disney was apolitical, but I find this conclusion not to be true....

Frank Rich, writing in New York magazine, has taken issue with my pieces on Goldwater, Republicans, and civil rights, calling it part of “the most insidious and determined campaign to rewrite racial history on the right.” If you can dig through Mr. Rich’s characteristically limp and emotive prose, you will discover that his argument amounts to: “Nyah, nyah! Strom Thurmond!”