Hillary Clinton’s speech today

So, Clinton said something today.

“Of course, there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment…but it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.”

Hillary Clinton, here, seems to have some very troubling memory problems…I wonder why that might be.

I’m going to skip Nixon’s Southern Strategy for now, which on its own directly contradicts Clinton’s comments. Likewise, I’m going to skip Reagan’s race-baiting and constant allusions to “welfare queens” used to propel himself into the Presidency on the back of a fiscally “conservative” platform. No, there’s one Presidential candidate — and major party nominee — who I’d prefer to discuss.

Barry Goldwater.

I’ll state outright, Goldwater personally opposed segregation. He integrated the Arizona National Guard. He voted for the Civil Rights Acts of ’57 and ’60, and famously proclaimed his vote against the ’64 Act was Constitutional, not ideological. Later in his life, he reversed his position on landmark civil rights cases such as Brown v. Board to embrace them.

Of course, this doesn’t change the ’64 election. An election, which predating Nixon’s Southern Strategy, heralded the exorcism of Rockefeller (i.e moderate) Republicans from the party at-large, and the rise of modern conservatism and identity politics among not just conservatives, but evangelical Christians. An election in which Goldwater carried only his home state — and the deep South.

After all, Goldwater beat Rockefeller in the primaries by opposing civil rights and desegregation. He would go on to run nationally on a campaign of opposing the courts and supporting states’ rights; put simply, Goldwater ran the first dog-whistle national campaign in contemporary Presidential history. In the South, however, it was a different story; the Goldwater campaign and its surrogates ran a brazenly racist, anti-civil rights, pro-segregation campaign.

A strategy which has proven beyond profitable for the Republican party at the national level, and the roadmap for every Republican presidential campaign since. It’s incredibly odd this seems to have slipped Clinton’s mind, but might I proffer a reason for this slippage?

[Skip to 1:08.]