Barry Goldwater

I have experienced defeat in presidential politics many times. Actually, I expect most Americans have. You win some, and you lose some. I first experienced defeat in 1964 when then-Sen. Barry Goldwater went down, though I was not even old enough to vote. I experienced it in 1968. I experienced it again in 1976, when my candidate was Ronald Reagan.

Over at Reason, University of Alabama professor of history David T. Beito has written a fascinating look at “Roosevelt’s War Against the Press.” The telling subtitle? “FDR Had His Own Breitbart, and Radio Was His Twitter.” Well, yes. Exactly. I have been writing for sometime that not only is the FDR and radio comparison to Trump and Twitter eerily analogous, but that two other presidents made…

Here we go again. Over at Business Insider, one-time Glenn Beck guy Oliver Darcy (he formerly of Beck’s The Blaze) and BI’s Pamela Engel have headlined "[t]he GOP must do something about the conservative media industrial complex if it wants to survive" in which they write that (brace yourselves) President Obama has correctly diagnosed the problem with the GOP. 

Are black Republicans Sen. Tim Scott and Reps. Mia Love and Will Hurd on the wrong side of the aisle? In a sense, they are, according to Jamelle Bouie, who argued in a Sunday piece that the conservatism central to the GOP is “fundamentally at odds with America’s people of color.” Bouie wrote that “no matter the temperamental affinities that might exist between some nonwhites and the Republican…

MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews was in rare from on Thursday night as he both factually tried to link the 1964 and 2016 presidential elections and appeared astonished that there could be an “intervention” (as has been reported for Donald Trump) for something other than “a dope problem or a booze problem.

Recently, both Vox’s Zack Beauchamp and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait have argued that ideological conservatism isn’t (and never has been) the major reason for Republican electoral success, and that those who consistently vote GOP because they believe in small government and low taxes are greatly outnumbered by those who do so because they’re racists.

The debate rages on as to whether Donald Trump has remodeled or vandalized the Republican party. In any event, left-wing pundits spent the week gaping at, and writing about, what they viewed as the grotesque spectacle of the RNC. For example, Daily Kos’s Hunter opined that the convention was "was barely one step up from an internet-peddled snuff film,” and Salon’s Heather Digby Parton declared…

In a Sunday post, The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker urged Bern-feelers to follow the example of conservatives who “rebounded from Barry Goldwater’s spectacular [1964] loss [and became] a dominant force. By forming influential think tanks and media outlets, pressuring the mainstream press to focus on issues right-wingers considered important, and voting consistently in even the most ‘minor’ of…

MSNBC political analyst and former Democratic Vermont Governor Howard Dean attempted on two occasions during Wednesday’s Hardball to further the extremely flawed and borderline irresponsible claim that Donald Trump’s candidacy is similar to that of 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. 

Barry Goldwater was a conservative hero and pioneer.  But his presidential run was an historic flop. So when Joe Scarborough described Ted Cruz on today's Morning Joe as "Barry Goldwater's ugly stepson," it was a scalding simile. Scarborough in turn scolded the Republican establishment for backing Cruz over John Kasich as the alternative to Donald Trump. Scarborough's argument focused on …

CNN host and liberal columnist Fareed Zakaria opened his eponymous Sunday talk show by rekindling the extremely flawed comparison made by the liberal media that 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump is similar to the conservative Barry Goldwater’s campaign against then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Veteran Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein on Thursday rejected the comparison of “authoritarian” Donald Trump to a principled man like Barry Goldwater. Bernstein appeared on CNN Tonight to discuss a 1964 commercial in which a man rejects the presidential candidacy of Goldwater because he’s “scary” and “weird" people support him.

Michael Lind thinks that movement conservatives are becoming a minor force in American politics, supplanted less by liberal Democrats than by what might be called Trump Republicans. In a Wednesday article for Politico, Lind contended that growing “populist discontent” is bringing about “the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something more like European national…

Vox editor-in-chief Klein doesn’t often look back fondly at the good old days of the conservative movement, but he did so in a Sunday post inspired by the death of Nancy Reagan. Klein thinks conservatism was at its best in the 1980s, for which he gives considerable credit to the First Couple of the era. Klein wrote that the “political genius” of the Reagans “was to shape the pessimistic, angry…