Republican Alternatives
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
PERSPECTIVES Republican Alternatives By William Henry Chamberlin The Republican party in 1964 faces more than the normal competition for its forthcoming presidential nomination. For it is a...
...The conservative Republican voters, it is assumed, would have no other place to go...
...They believe that the people who want more action in Washington, more spending for health, education, urban blight, foreign aid and similar items will vote Democratic anyway...
...He has gone pretty well down the line for the liberal view on social legislation...
...Bush's condemnation is particularly meaningful because it comes from a relatively liberal Republican, and not a spokesman from the party's conservative wing...
...The motive for this strategy is not difficult to grasp...
...For it is a party both out of office and without a recognized political leader...
...But Goldwater still cannot be counted out, for he possesses a sizable bloc of prospective Southern electoral votes...
...The Republicans have been the minority party since 1932...
...Under these circumstances, the argument runs, the only chance to elect a Republican President is to nominate a candidate who will win over a considerable number of independent voters as well as some Democrats...
...The odds, however, are still in favor of avoiding an outspoken conservative candidate...
...If one talks with him in his Senate office in Washington, he starts out by brushing off the suggestion with the remark that no one from a thinly populated state is likely to be the choice of the convention...
...If it turns out that Rockefeller has been permanently damaged by his second marriage, then some middle-of-the-road candidate like George Romney of Michigan or William Scranton of Pennsylvania may well emerge with the nomination...
...So the real Republican opportunity, they feel, lies in concentrating on the supposedly large latent conservative vote in the Middle West, the Mountain States and the South...
...And, as if these were not problems enough, the Republicans are also faced with a conflict of alternative strategies...
...One strategy which has prevailed in Republican councils over four decades—since, in fact, the election of Calvin Coolidge in 1924—has been to select a standardbearer somewhat to the left of the conservative rank-and-file...
...And they have been in possession of the Executive Branch only during the two terms of Dwight D. Eisenhower, an enormously popular individual whose basic appeal was really not as a Republican politician...
...Is Goldwater a possible Republican candidate in 1964...
...But at the same time he has not been oblivious to such straws in the wind as the poll of delegates to the 1960 Republican convention which showed the largest number favoring him for '64, or a recent Gallup poll which shows him ahead of Rockefeller...
...The natural candidate for this school of strategy is Arizona's Senator Barry M. Goldwater...
...Given the Democratic party's commitment since New Deal days to an increasingly large role for government, a Democratic candidate would still be more obnoxious than any liberal Republican...
...Only twice during this period have they controlled Congress...
...He has taken a strong civil rights position...
...Still more important, he has twice proved his ability to win New York, a state in which minority groups, who usually vote Democratic, are strongly represented...
...This was shown rather significantly in the strong language used by former Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut in rejecting the idea of Rockefeller's candidacy...
...It is sometimes forgotten that Herbert Hoover was a favorite with liberal publications like the New Republic in the years after World War I, and that there was an aura of Midwestern progressivism about Alf Landon...
...And his nomination would at least answer the long-standing question: How much appeal does conservatism have for the American people...
...This temporary decline in Rockefeller's political stock has enhanced the hopes of those Republicans who favor an alternative strategy: the nomination of a frank, outspoken conservative who will take an unequivocally conservative view on such matters as Cuba, foreign relations, and the controversial issues of taxation and social policy...
...A sweep of these regions, if it included those states with substantial electoral votes, could defeat Kennedy in 1964...
...The reaction to Rockefeller's marriage, however, changed the picture drastically...
...Until his recent remarriage, Nelson Rockefeller seemed a tailormade figure for this strategy...
Vol. 46 • July 1963 • No. 14
