THINKING THINGS OVER
Barry Goldwater
Will anxious voters choose an ideological extremist over an incumbent president?
BY VERMONT ROYSTER
Monday, August 25, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
(Editor's note: This column appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 6, 1964, three days after LBJ's landslide victory over Sen. Goldwater.)
Whatever a man says in public, there is always a hurt in his heart when he has offered his services to his countrymen and they have rejected him. For Barry Goldwater, right now, that pain must be especially acute.
He lacks the comfort of Adlai Stevenson, who could at least tell himself that he lost to a great popular hero, or of Richard Nixon, who could console himself with the thought that very nearly half his fellows did want him to be President.
Mr. Goldwater must know in his heart that he personally contributed to making a defeat a debacle, and that in so doing he not only lost for himself but made a shambles of his party. Most of all, there must be an aching wonder about what injury he has done to the political fortunes of the political philosophy in which he so deeply believes.
For Barry Goldwater, being a forthright man, is not likely to blink the stark facts of the electoral returns. Aside from his own Arizona he carried only five states, and those the wrong ones for the wrong reason. It surely does his party no good, and brings no comfort to a man of such good will, to see victory grow only in those places where it is nurtured by racial emotion.
The facts are equally stark in the contests of his Republican colleagues. Simple arithmetic shows that it was Mr. Goldwater, not Mr. Keating, who lost the New York senatorial raced; in the face of that avalanche not even a million and a half split votes were enough to save Senator Keating. Much the same was true in Illinois, where the defeated Charles Percy ran ahead of the national ticket. And so it went across the land.
Even in those places where Republicans did squeak through it was in spite of, not because of, the party standard bearer.
As for the causes for all this, there is little comfort here either for Barry.It's true enough that Mr. Goldwater began with much running against him, the prosperity of the country, the emotional spillover from President Kennedy's assassination (which the Democrats used crudely and blatantly), the natural inclination of Americans to give Lyndon a chance and their normal disinclination to turn out incumbent Presidents. All this might well have beaten him, or any Republican, anyway.
Yet it's also true that Senator Goldwater made a mess of his own campaign because he misunderstood some simple, fundamental things about American politics and the American people.
Barry Goldwater's high point was at San Francisco, where he won the nomination because a great many people--more, surely, than finally voted for him--share an uneasiness about some of the things happening to their country and a yearning for a change.
The first mistake was in the art of party leadership. The selection of Representative Miller was a blunder because, rightly or wrongly, he did not inspire confidence in a people made acutely aware of the mortality of Presidents. It suggested either a poverty of leadership within the party or too casual an attitude toward the office of Vice President.
The acceptance speech was a mistake in the same vein. It seemed to say that the convention victory meant unconditional surrender for those in the party who differed, as many always will in any political party. It hinted at both a want of magnanimity to the vanquished and too little tolerance toward diversity.
But perhaps Mr. Goldwater's greatest error was in misunderstanding the nature of the uneasiness felt by many citizens.
These people, of numbers yet unknown, are made uneasy by a Government ceaselessly growing bigger and more powerful, by doubts that relentless depreciation of money is the magic potion of prosperity, that the good society is built on dubious public morals, or that a nation's safety lies in eager wooing of its enemies.
But this isn't the same thing as a desire to repeal everything, without qualification or distinction, that has been done this past quarter century. In leaving the impression that this was his aim--whether it was in fact or fancy--the Senator stirred a different uneasiness among the people.
Nonetheless, not all Barry Goldwater's efforts will pass without an imprint. One evidence of this effect is that Lyndon Johnson felt constrained to appear more "conservative" in many matters than has been the democratic wont. Another can be found in one of the polls of public sentiment made before the election by Louis Harris, a favorite pulse-taker for the Democrats.That poll rightly predicted the Johnson landslide. But Mr. Harris also uncovered some revealing things about the public's attitude toward some of Mr. Goldwater's ideas.
An overwhelming 88% of the voters, the poll found, agreed with Mr. Goldwater's plea that prayers in the public school should be restored. An even bigger majority--94%--concurred in the Senator's view that the Government has been seriously lax in its security regulations over Government employees.
Perhaps these are peripheral matters. But there's nothing insignificant in the finding that fully half of the electorate shared Mr. Goldwater's concern about morality and corruption in Government and said that on this score they had more confidence in him than in Mr. Johnson.
Or in the poll's finding that 60% of the voters agreed about the demoralizing effect of some of the Government's welfare and relief programs. Finally, there is a deep significance in the revealing statistic that six of every ten voters agreed with the central thesis of Mr. Goldwater's philosophy--namely, that the power of the Federal Government should be trimmed.
Here, then, is a contribution from Barry Goldwater. The landslide vote, as Mr. Harris prophesied, reflected a fear that the Senator would be too reckless abroad, at home too much of a bull in the china closet. But what the people heard an honest man say made an impression that could linger long after the man himself has been dismissed. There have been other times in politics when this proved portentous.
Small comfort now, perhaps, for a vanquished man. But however poorly fought the battle there can be honor in it for those who strive, and in the war of ideas oftentimes the substitute for victory comes hereafter.
Mr. Royster, who died in 1996 at 82, was editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1958 to 1971. He wrote "Thinking Things Over" until 1986. Robert Bartley is on vacation.
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