A Goldwater Republican Goes For Obama As GOP Tent Shrinks

http://nebraska.statepaper.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2009/03/02/49abfc7c05284



By Jack Allen

March 02, 2009

I will be offering commentary on a regular basis, often about President Barack Obama and his administration, so readers might be interested in the evolution of my politics – from a committed Republican to a passionate supporter of Obama’s election.

My parents were Democrats and the first memories I have of politics date to 1948, marching through our neighborhood in Bellevue, Nebraska, with friends, pounding sticks on garbage can lids and shouting: “Dewey in the garbage can, Truman in the White House!”

Things changed quickly. My parents were Kansans and put party aside to support Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. I was 11-years-old and distributed “I Like Ike” brochures door-to-door. I again volunteered in Eisenhower’s 1957 campaign and at age 15 was allowed to travel to Washington alone to witness Ike’s second inauguration. I was obviously hooked on politics.

By 1960, my parents and I were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans supporting Richard Nixon for president. I volunteered in his suburban Chicago campaign and was also active in the re-election campaign of Gov. Bill Stratton and the DuPage County courthouse campaigns. My congressman, Elmer J. Hoffman, invited me to his Wheaton, Illinois, home for election night. (He was famous or infamous for sleeping through House floor debates.) When Nixon lost, Hoffman spent time telling me about a senator from Arizona by the name of Barry M. Goldwater.

As Nebraska chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, which William F. Buckley Jr. helped found, I was involved early in Goldwater’s run for the presidency. The most exciting meeting with Goldwater was in 1963, in Minneapolis, because we knew everything was in place to win the Republican nomination for him in 1964. I put my heart and soul into that campaign and took an entire month’s paycheck to purchase Goldwater materials for the GOP headquarters in Bellevue.

Knowing that Goldwater had only reluctantly sought the presidency after President Kennedy’s assassination, I knew he wouldn’t run again in 1968, so I turned my attention to the Republican I thought most likely to win in 1968, Richard Nixon. In the autumn of 1967 I filed with the Nebraska Secretary of State for election as an at-large alternate to the 1968 Republican National Convention, pledged to Nixon. Nixon aide Dwight Chapin later told me I was the first Nixon supporter in the country to file for the convention. I worked hard as a volunteer in Nixon’s campaign and was rewarded with one of the unpaid “advisory” slots presidential administrations dole out to supporters they don’t know what else to do with. (The Cabinet member I “advised” – Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans – was charged with a Watergate crime but acquitted by a District of Columbia jury.) I campaigned again for Nixon in 1972, serving on the Nebraska executive committee of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (the infamous CREEP).

I campaigned for Gerald Ford in 1976, an election I think Ford would have won had Ronald Reagan not challenged him in the primaries and at the convention, forcing Ford to spend much of the Fall campaign mending GOP fences. In 1980, former Omaha Congressman John Y. McCollister and I tried to launch a grassroots campaign for Ford, but by then Reaganites controlled the GOP and Ford wasn’t interested (although in a kind note he thanked me for my support.)

FULL story at link.

Haven't had a reason to vote for them since.

I think Jerry was the last true Republican.

Philosophically, that's when the party lost its center and turned hard right.

Barry was asked about the "new" GOP...his flat answer, in classic Goldwater style..."These sren't Republicans, these are shitheads"...I gained a lot of respect for BG that day.

(Oddly, I now live in NE...:hi: )

Mo Udall democrat I had plenty of areas of disagreement with Goldwater's politics, but I can tell you he was an honorable man. He would be considered less than a pure conservative today. He had a great big libertarian streak in him and before his death even spoke out in favor of gay rights. He was part of the MIC and was certainly considered a hawk. He was a fiscal conservative in every sense of the word and the Bush II years would have driven him nuts.

I promise you, as conservative as he was, he would NEVER have asserted that he wanted his President to fail. No way, no how, not under any circumstances. I suspect that Reagan, as misguided as his vision often turned out to be, would never have wished that either.

So this is what the fundamentalist, neocon, trickle down party has become. Fuck them and fuck them again.

on logic..thanks, Steve.