The son of Barry Goldwater — the five-time Arizona senator and staunch conservative who lost by a landslide to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential race — tells
Newsmax TV his father had very little chance of winning due to no fault of his own.
"This just happened right after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. We had three assassinations in the 1960s, we had turmoil going on, I don't think any Republican would have won that 1964 race," Barry Goldwater, Jr. said Thursday to J.D. Hayworth on "Newsmax Prime."
"That was a monumental time in the history of the Republican Party. Up to that point, the liberal, eastern establishment to the Rockefellers, Mitt Romney's father George Romney, Bill Scranton from Pennsylvania, they controlled the party [and were] pretty moderate to liberal.
"And Goldwater took that party away from them and re-established the Republican Party as a philosophy of conservativism. Obviously in those races you're going to get a lot of turmoil, a lot of shouting, a lot of name calling…."
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What can the Republican Party learn from its shattering loss in 1964?
"We have to remember that politics is a grassroots activity. The committees, the people who knock on doors and stuff envelopes, that is the Republican Party and that is how my father basically won that nomination in '64," said Goldwater Jr., a California Republican, who served in the House of Representatives from 1969 to 1986.
"We don't see that same kind of grassroots activity here in this election. We see sloganeering at its best. Unfortunately, we look back to the history of the presidential elections. A lot of our presidents were elected because of their slogans: 'Hope and Change,' 1969 when Reagan said, 'I've got a plan,' and Barry Goldwater, 'In your heart you know he's right.'"
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