Goldwater book

Peter K. peterk at enteract.com
Sun Apr 8 10:03:33 PDT 2001


Rick Perlstein's new book _ Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus_ is reputed to be a good history of the American Right. (Doug maybe you can check it out and see if he got the milieu of the Right in the '70s correct.)

At the American Prospect website, I found Perlstein's pick for the Democratic challenget to Bush in 2004. http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2001/01/kaminer-w-01-19.html

Jan. 19, 2001 Choice: Jesse Jackson, Jr.

I'll leave it to others to proffer the Gores and the Gephardts, the Daschles and the Davises. It is time to sin boldly. Our times have yielded us a great moral issue: the bad theories and naked lies of corporate managed trade. This is, of course, debatable; great moral issues -- slavery, civil rights, Vietnam -- always are. But for those of us who believe that there is little in the dominant nostrums of "globalization" that isn't explained in the epigram that the law in its majesty forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge, the spectrum that stretches from NAFTA to "not this NAFTA" is an insult to the imagination. And that leaves out the Gores and the Gephardts, the Daschles and the Davises.

I'm struck by something Barry Goldwater said at the 1960 Republican convention after a rump group, unbidden, almost sabotaged Richard Nixon's centrist nomination-by-acclamation on his behalf. "Turn your group into a permanent organization of young conservatives," he advised. "The man is not important. The principles you espouse are." At that particular historical juncture, he was right: Daring them to lead their leaders, so that their leaders would lead them. I don't know Jesse Jackson Jr.; I haven't picked through his record with even a rough-toothed comb. But what Jackson, barely old enough to run for president in 2004, has already done is courageous, astringent, and visionary: When the Clinton Administration adopted Representative Phil Crane's NAFTA-ish African Growth and Opportunity Act thus making it a shoo-in, Jackson bucked his president with a counter-bill that is a textbook model of what globalization should really look like. In a model of anti-DLC coalition building, he found 74 fellow Democrats to sponsor it; then, presciently for the time, he unleashed 11,000 citizen activists registered with his Web site to lobby for it. (Just this is a record of actual accomplishment far to surpass what Barry Goldwater had in 1964, much of whose outlandish politics would in but 30 years find their way to the Democratic center.)

Will Jr. fail to honor the confidence I thus place in him? Almost certainly: no less than that flawed vessel Barry Goldwater; or, for that matter, Jesse Jackson Sr. Is he radical? If not, let us lead him to it. Will he sell out? If so, let us lead him from it. Or someone else. The man is not important, the principles are. Let us dare a political imagination equal to our hunger for victory. The former may well turn out, in decades if not quadrennials, to vindicate the latter. [end]



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