The GOP primary race between Taft and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 was a particularly close and bitterly contested affair that lasted right up to the convention. Once the convention opened, the Eisenhower camp, unsure of its chances of winning fair and square, persuaded the convention to replace pro-Taft delegates from a number of states with pro-Eisenhower delegates, alleging that the Taft camp had unfairly stolen them (echoes of more recent treatment of Ron Paul supporters in several state conventions). In spite of the Taft camp’s angry denials, the convention voted in favor of this so-called “Fair Play” proposal, and Eisenhower, by convention-floor sleight of hand, wrested the nomination from Robert Taft.
Only once in modern times has a candidate in violation of establishment orthodoxy secured the presidential nomination. In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater, a conservative who did not fit the establishment mold, managed to get the GOP presidential nomination. Comments Quigley, “The capture of the Republican National Party by the extremist elements of the Republican Congressional Party in 1964, and their effort to elect Barry Goldwater to the Presidency with the petty-bourgeois extremists [note the Marxist terminology] alone, was only a temporary aberration on the American political scene.” Indeed, Goldwater soon found not only the Democratic Party but the leadership of his own party working against him. Nelson Rockefeller, a New York governor and leader of the liberal establishment wing of the GOP, helped to sabotage Goldwater’s campaign. The Arizona Senator was smeared as a war-monger, and an infamous anti-Goldwater campaign commercial showed a small child picking a daisy right before an atomic bomb detonated. The implication was that the fiery Goldwater would start a nuclear war, and it helped sink the GOP standard-bearer’s campaign. Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election to Lyndon Johnson, another big-government liberal who plunged America into the Vietnam War and whose Great Society welfare program of the sixties was surpassed only by the New Deal in scope and cost.
Since the Goldwater campaign, America’s ruling establishment has successfully denied non-housetrained candidates a realistic shot at the presidency. Ronald Reagan talked a good talk, but his pick of arch-insider George Bush as his veep signaled his intention not to rock the boat. As president, Reagan continued to give lip service to limited government, but supported business as usual — bigger government, more favors to special interests, refusal to abolish programs he campaigned against — with his signing pen.
Connect With Us