What exactly was Barry Goldwater's platform?

I hear about how he changed the Republican party from the center to center-right party it was at the time to far right, but he doesn't really seem like a far right guy at all. Apparentely he wanted to kick all the liberals and centrists out of the party, but he seems like a centrist. He opposed criminalizing abortion. He was generally supportive of gay rights and some gun control. While he did oppose the Civil Rights Act, even most black leaders admit his reasons had nothing to do with racism and he actually had a good recod on civil rights while on the Phoenix city council. And he strongly disliked the Robertson/Falwell crew, who it seems are more responsible, along with Reagan, for today's modern Republican party than Goldwater. If the modern day Republican party was the party of Goldwater we wouldn't have anywhere near as many problems as we do now. So why was he known as being so far right?

small-government conservative tied to intense anti-communism.

Sad that by today's standards, he's rather moderate.

That was Goldwater's slogan.

:nuke:

http://www.nationalcenter.org/Goldwater.html

"During four, futile years the administration which we shall replace has distorted and lost that faith. it has talked and talked and talked and talked the words of freedom, but it has failed and failed and failed in the works of freedom.

Now failure cements the wall of shame in Berlin; failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs; failures marked the slow", death of freedom in Laos; failures infest the jungles of Vietnam; and failures haunt the houses of our once great alliances and undermine the greatest bulwark ever erected by free nations, the NATO community.

Failures proclaim lost leadership, obscure purpose, weakening wills, and the risk of inciting our sworn enemies to new aggressions and to new excesses.

And because of this administration we are tonight a world divided. We are a nation becalmed. We have lost the brisk pace of diversity and the genius of individual creativity. We are plodding at a pace set by centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse.

Rather than useful jobs in our country, people have been offered bureaucratic make-work; rather than moral leadership, they have been given bread and circuses; they have been given spectacles, and, yes, they've even been given scandals."

and the chorus was:
So let's go back to the days when men were men
and start the first World War all over again!

That's right, you tell 'em son.
Isolationism can be fun!...

edit: typo

She was a Republican at the time, I believe her father was a Goldwater Republian.

I will admit the man had some really moral beliefs but he was not interested in an activist state. Later in life, I believe he recanted some of the harsher views he held dear in the early 60s. Like many, perhaps he started noticing shades of gray as he got older. And he was concerned for the environment.

I believe he was also critical of the 'Newt' wing of the GOP which was gaining power as AuH20 was taking his leave of this life.

edited to add: He was firmly in favor of fiscal responsibility, unlike the neocons who are all for cutting their own taxes AND spending money (at businesses owned by their pals) like drunken sailors. {Apologies to any drunken spendthrift sailors out there. Most sailors I ever saw had to be pretty careful with a buck}

That Goldwater once said that every good Christiaon shoud kick Falwell right in the ass.

most of today's Democrats would be considered right-wing if viewed by 1964 standards.

Some of had to do with Goldwater's old-line Reader's-Digest-type conservative rhetoric. A lot of it had to do with the hot-button issues of the day: civil rights and anti-communism. In practice, being anti-communist meant an effective declaration of war against any nominally communist government. Although had he been elected, Goldwater might not have been any worse in Vietnam than Johnson.

I agree with your point -- by today's standards, Goldwater does not look nearly as extreme as he was painted in the campaign. LBJ did quite an effective political attack. And the media was not on Goldwater's side, either.

BTW, I remember my father working on the Goldwater campaign -- being a chemist, he appreciated the AuH2O bumper stickers.