Well, yeah-what do you think the “counting daisy” ad was all about?
I never saw it. We didn’t have 24 hour cable news back then.
We would have had Vietnam with Goldwater too. That was one of Goldwater’s criticisms of Johnson…that he wasn’t pursuing the war aggressively enough, and that we needed to invade North Vietnam. Here’s the party platform, btw:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showplatforms.php?platindex=R1964
It’s hilarious to watch liberals try to exalt conservatives that they used to vilify in the harshest possible terms.
When Barry Goldwater was alive and well and in the Senate, liberals treated him as a demon. Now that he’s safely dead, they hold him up as a shining example of a “true” conservative.
There’s no question that Goldwater moved sharply leftward in his final few years- but in his final campaign for the Senate, he desperately needed the Religious Right, and he shamelessly pandered to them.
Which means that, if he HAD done a 180 on abortion and gay rights (it now appears he had), he lacked the courage to say so on the campaign trail. Making him a coward and a fraud, rather than an admirable “true” conservative.
Astorian, these days, I’m holding Nixon up as a shining star. Look at what he did. Look at the kind of things he supported.
For crying out loud, the Hillary/Obama health insurance plan? We almost had it thirty years ago. Only reason we didn’t is the AFL-CIO thought they’d be able to get a better deal.
Nixon had it as a plank in his platform. It was a Republican policy.
It’s not that Goldwater is safely dead. It’s that the world has changed, and not for the better.
Those changes, though, whether for better or for worse, are due in large part to Barry Goldwater and his disciples. You mention we almost had universal health care 30 years ago, but do you really think that Goldwater would have supported that? Remember, Goldwater canceled his vacation so he could get back to the Senate to vote against the Medicare bill. I mean, you’re trying to prove Goldwater by mentioning Nixon, but Goldwater hated Nixon, because he thought Nixon was both dishonest and too liberal.
In terms of all these “social issues”, he was adamantly against abortion until he changed his position in 1983, but even in 1980, he backed the human rights amendment. He didn’t start opposing a consitutional amendment to bring prayer back in schools until 1984. And he was against gay rights legislation in the '80s…he didn’t change his mind on that until after he retired from the Senate.
Now hold on-I didn’t necessarily say I’d vote for him (although I do wish he had been the one pushing for more civil rights), but he you can’t deny he was a hell of a guy, and a pretty fascinating individual. Even if he did believe in UFOs. 
(And I don’t care if it was only one incident-encouraging kicking Falwell’s ass deserves major props. Period.)
I never vilified Goldwater. I did vilify Nixon and I’ll still vilify Nixon, although W has made me appreciate him a whole lot better.