Liberal Repercussion

>>>>>> Goldwater appeared as new and as startling as the booming suburbs in the desert.

Yet in his older years the founding father of conservatism gazed out upon his works and recoiled. It was not, after all, what he had had in mind. He railed against the right's intolerance, sanctimony and bullying. The author of the early seminal manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, took to calling himself in public a "liberal". And he denounced the right as the enemy of liberty.

"Barry was always a social liberal," Susan Goldwater Levine, his widow, keeper of the flame, told me at her home in Phoenix. "Barry believed that people should be allowed to do whatever they wanted in their own homes." When Goldwater observed the right trying to use government to enforce private morality, he spoke up for women's right to abortion and gay rights. His wife insisted that his convictions had remained unaltered, but that the movement for which he was the avatar had become warped. "He hated it that the rightwing zealots took over the party," she said.

Perhaps widow Goldwater speaks for a man who can no longer speak for himself. But it is inarguable that it's Arizona - bastion of conservatism - along with the other southwest states of New Mexico and Nevada which are, far more than those of the deep south, the battlegrounds in the forthcoming presidential election. For they may vote Democrat.<<<<<<

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1156648,00.html

posted by Rei Toei @ 10:30 p.m.