Quote: algernonpj wrote in post #1

---

Goldwater and Trump: A Much Abused Comparison
What really lies behind the mask of #NeverTrump.
September 2, 2016
Paul Gottfried



A comparison that is repeatedly made by Democrats and establishment Republicans concerns Trump’s campaign and the disastrous defeat of GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. This comparison is unfortunately more often than not abused. For example, Shermichael Singleton, a Republican consultant, in The Hill (June 7) faults Trump for replicating Goldwater’s “alienation of minority voters” from the GOP. This estrangement allegedly began when Goldwater took issue with the Public Accommodations Clause of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet the black vote for Republican presidential candidates had been declining for decades before Goldwater became a presidential candidate, going all the way back to the electoral victory of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

Further, despite Eisenhower’s success in winning almost 40% of black voters in 1952, running, incidentally, against a Democratic ticket with a Southern segregationist vice presidential candidate, the black vote had moved dramatically into the Democratic column before Goldwater’s crack-up. Finally, there is no evidence that Trump is doing worse among minorities than that exemplary establishment Republican Mitt Romney. Right now the Donald is polling about 15 % of the black vote, which is well beyond what Romney and McCain obtained.

It is equally silly to insist, like Erick Erickson, Guy Benson and other GOP establishmentarians, that Trump is about to lose the presidential race with a crushing defeat comparable to the one suffered by Goldwater in 1964. In that year the incumbent Lyndon Johnson won over 60% of the popular vote and more than three-quarters of the electoral vote. Goldwater was trailing Johnson by more than twenty percent through most of the campaign. Right now Trump is running only slightly behind Hillary, and the gap is likely to tighten over the next few weeks, if Trump stays on script and if his opponent becomes implicated in more scandals (which is highly likely).

..........................................................

There were certainly nasty remarks made about Goldwater by Democrats and by intellectuals on the left, but the party loyalists rarely if ever went after him with the vitriol and scatological insults that is now characteristic of GOP-neocon Trump-haters. To cite just a few examples of this continuing abuse

.........................................................

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/264045/g...-paul-gottfried

---

The hand gthat held the dagger for Goldwater was Nelson "Hiya Fella!" Rockefeller and the Country club GOP that coalesced around him. You know, like Christine Whitman, and the same stooges wrapping themselves in moral superiority today, when actually, they're more akin to fish wrapped in newspaper - on a hot, hot, windless day...