Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
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And bfgrn is now channeling JFK and Goldwater both! Wow!!![]()
Yea, JFK and Goldwater...imagine that...
Goldwater, JFK Election Campaign In '64 Might Have Offered Public A Great Debate
Since his death, much of the conversation about Goldwater has recalled his 1964 presidential campaign against Lyndon B. Johnson. And why not? It was the election that launched the modern conservative movement as well as the career of Ronald Reagan.
A few years ago I interviewed many people about that 1964 campaign and stumbled across an interesting tidbit: It was the election that could have changed American politics.
In 1963, Goldwater and his friend, John F. Kennedy, shared a radical plan: The two men would campaign as a team. The Republican and the Democratic president would barnstorm the country and speak on the same platform. The ideas - conservative vs. liberal - would be debated and the election would be a referendum on public policy.
"I knew him as a close friend and I had really looked forward to running against him in the election that was to be held," Goldwater wrote after Kennedy's death in 1963. The two candidates planned to stump the country "like politicians should do. Standing up to state our points, our issues, and then debating each other."
Imagine that. These two politicians could have built a stage for a politics of discourse, a test of ideas. Goldwater was fond of JFK. It was a friendship that did not require affirmation; they could agree to disagree.
Kennedy's assassination ended the notion of a joint campaign stage.
Goldwater even withdrew from the Republican field, saying he no longer had the stomach for a campaign. However, in January of 1964, after much pressure from his colleagues, he took up the fight against Johnson. Goldwater promised a Scottsdale crowd: "I will not change my beliefs to win votes. I will offer a choice, not an echo."
That choice did not include side-by-side comparisons with the Democratic nominee. Goldwater had no use for Johnson.
Imagine THAT...
Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
Barry Goldwater
We have all made mistakes. But Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the occasional faults of a party living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a party frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
President John F. Kennedy