“… Goldwater’s popularity as a conservative candidate stemmed in very substantial part from the sharp contrast between his personal and political qualities and those of John Kennedy. Time, and the poignant fact of Kennedy’s subsequent assassination, have softened and sanctified our memories of the man; but two decades ago he was a living, breathing politician, not an icon, and a great many people were prepared to consider an alternative in 1964. Kennedy was from … the Northeast, and connoted many qualities associated with it: Harvard, great wealth, sophistication, and political liberalism. Goldwater hailed from … the opposite and newest corner of the nation, the Southwest, and personified most of the human characteristics associated with its people: a sort of rugged, earthy, manly innocence… Kennedy’s sudden replacement by Johnson, therefore, was little short of a disaster for Goldwater’s hopes of election … Instead of confronting a northeasterner, with whom he could contrast spectacularly and perhaps to advantage, Goldwater would now be pitted against a fellow southwesterner … from a background not merely less opulent than Kennedy’s, but dirt poor. Worst of all, Johnson, despite his political origins in FDR’s New Deal, was identified, and rightly, with the relatively conservative southern wing of the Democratic party … Goldwater and his managers would never be able to persuade most Americans that Lyndon Johnson represented any of the new tendencies in the country which so many of them feared and opposed.”
Source: The Rise of the Right (1984)
Keywords: elections,campaigns,biography
