Like Marty McFly, Washington Post columnist George Will has gone “Back to the Future,” and found there, not his parents as teens, but William F. Buckley, parent to the modern conservative movement, warning his flock that Sen. Barry Goldwater was on the fast track to failure, and the movement should save what it could.
In 2012, as Will says, it is deja vu redux, with the Republican nominee leading the party to hopeless oblivion. Can this be true, or is his time machine faulty? Here are four reasons to think that it is:
First, 2012 is not 1964. Goldwater himself knew the election was over when his friend John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, when it was already clear that three presidents in one year would be one too much for most of the country, and that the guilt, grief and nostalgia regarding the victim would overwhelm much of the race.
Johnson’s performance through 1964 was also remarkable (he would not come apart until later) and had Goldwater not won some Deep South states almost by accident — he had voted against the Civil Right Act because one section violated his small government principles, though he was an integrationist and a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People member — he might have lost every state except his home state, Arizona, instead of the 45 states that he did.
Goldwater was in most ways a pretty bad candidate, but a combination of Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt could not have prevailed in such an environment. This is not true of this year.
Second, Mitt Romney is not Goldwater redux. Rick Santorum is — think Goldwater, minus the nuance and outreach — rousing the base, while repelling the rest of the country, while Romney is just the reverse.
The far right is cool to him, but (as Jay Cost has reported) Romney is poised exactly at the midpoint of the Republican Party, strong with those to the right or the left of this center, very strong with the “somewhat conservative,” while being conservative enough not to enrage or discourage the base.
Goldwater lost when he lost large chunks of his party (as George McGovern would do eight years later), and terrified independents. Romney is unable to terrify anyone, and well-positioned to pick off conservative Democrats, and the independents who swung to John McCain before the economy cratered, and went back to Obama the moment it did.
This doesn’t mean he will do it, but it means that he can, depending on circumstance, and on Obama. And Obama is no LBJ.
Third, Johnson in 1964 was a colossus, still seen as a national, not a partisan leader, who took over the helm in a moment of crisis, and kept the ship safely afloat.
His civil rights bill, which he cleverly framed as a tribute to Kennedy, was both a historic and a truly bipartisan measure. His approval ratings for much of that year were around 70 percent, and there was ample reason for Republican centrists to want to reward him, which of course many did.
Obama’s ratings are in the mid-40s, the bills that he passed are very unpopular, and he is polarizing in the extreme. He is a first-rate campaigner, and much more appealing than is his agenda, and cannot be discounted. So much will depend on events.
Fourth, events are the key that will open the outcome, and we have no idea now what they are. What will gas cost, in July, and October? Will the unemployment rate sink, or rise, if more of the unemployed return to the work force? Will Syria explode in our faces? Will Israel take on Iran?
Until we know these, projections are useless. Put “Back To the Future” on
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
