Say "1964," and those of us old enough might think of the appearance on Ed Sullivan's show of some little British group called the Beatles. But Chris Matthews recalls something else: the Republican party's decision to nominate Mr. Conservative, Barry Goldwater, and his ensuing wipeout by LBJ.
On his MSNBC show tonight, Matthews suggested that Republicans are in a similarly reckless mood, and might well nominate a true conservative, electoral consequences be damned. And, oh yeah, Chris contended that the GOP would do so out of racist motives.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I tell you, I know it's just CPAC, but I smell another '64, another Goldwater year, where they don't care about winning, they want to show their gutsy attitude of anger against illegal immigrants, or immigrants generally, and their anger against the Republican establishment. They don't like people like Bush or Boehner . . .
Were it not for history—19th century history—would anyone call the current conservative-dominated GOP the party of Lincoln? The facts are there in front of us. The strength of what constitutes the Republican party in the congress is centered now in the South, centered in the very geography that opposed Lincoln's candidacy, believed that his election was reason itself for Civil War. Where is it weak? Where has it lost its base of belief? It is no longer the party that voted overwhelmingly for civil rights and voting rights in the mid '60s.
In fact, its most consistent ambition these recent years has been a relentless push to limit voting rights especially for minorities by the imposition of new voter ID requirements, and with it, it's doing what the Jim Crow enforcers did with poll taxes and outlandish literacy tests.
The question is how this movement is going to end up? Will the right wing bolt the Republican establishment, the Bush-Boehner club, or will the establishment one more time they put the right in its place, taking their votes while bouncing their slate of candidates, the Cruzes, Huckabees, Carsons well into the back seat?
Everything we see, the spectacle of CPAC, the Speaker's defeat on homeland security, the weakness of Bush in the polls, all point to a coming division. For the first time in a half-century, I can see the right doing the bouncing and overthrowing the Bushes and the Boehners and heading for the wild poltical horizon. I'm concerned about the usual notions of political advantage, not caring whether it loses at all to honor the single dazzling prospect that, given all the anger in the land, it just could win it all. So what will it be? A walk-out by the right? Or a takeover not seen since Goldwater days?
