David Shribman
The United States has had 57 presidential elections, and every one of them has been different – different circumstances, different candidates, different technologies, different strategies, different tactics. The electorate itself has been different – the early ones only among land holders, later ones only among males, until the 1960s largely without black voters, and until 1972 with no voters under the age of 21.
So it is perilous to compare elections that have occurred, variously, in the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
And yet as the two major American political parties gird themselves for the 58th presidential election two years from now, there are remarkable similarities between the shape of the contests in 1964 and 2016.
Like this election, that 1964 contest, conducted 50 years ago, involved a question of natural succession in the governing party. Like this election, that 1964 contest contained a deep division in the opposition party. Like this election, that 1964 contest involved a struggle over the nature and character of American conservatism. Like this election, that 1964 contest contained a vital debate over the role of government in American society and in the American economy.
A half-century ago Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy , sought to sculpt a profile of continuity after the tragic events in Dallas. Mr. Johnson would eventually find his own path – his Great Society was months away, only a gleam in LBJ's eye as the primary election campaigning began – but as activists prepared for a New Hampshire primary effort the president was careful to appear in language, spirit and content as the curator of JFK's legacy and the trustee of his policy positions.
At the same time the Republicans, frustrated in their four years out of power since Dwight Eisenhower entered retirement, spent the first-in-the-nation primary in a fullblown, angry debate about what kind of party – and how conservative a party – they were.
On the right was Barry Goldwater, deeply tanned from Arizona, deeply conservative from the desert west, deeply skeptical about the virtue of the beloved old-age supplements known as Social Security, deeply militant in his opposition to Soviet Russia and Communism. On the left (but really in the centre) was Nelson A. Rockefeller, with an eastern, Ivy League profile and an establishment moderate outlook.
Up and down this tiny state, then a remote outpost of flinty Yankee values, they fought like cats, two national political giants combining for at least four dozen campaign days in an electorate of fewer than 90,000 souls, many of them with television reception so primitive that they could only get one station, only in black-and-white, and then only if the wind was blowing in the right direction.
(The Goldwater-Rockefeller conflict was great theatre and vitally important in American history. But the campaign was conducted here in New Hampshire to no avail. The winner of the primary was seated 10,000 miles away in Saigon as American ambassador to turbulent South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. He won in a remarkable write-in vote precisely 50 years ago Monday.)
So how does 1964 compare with the situation in 2014, two years from the next presidential election?
In the Democratic Party there is a sense of natural succession, and if there is any drama at all, it is between two political figures with legitimate claims as natural successors: the highly favoured Hillary Rodham Clinton, who served as Barack Obama's well-traveled secretary of state after losing the 2008 Democratic nomination struggle to the Illinois senator, and Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has been Mr. Obama's vice president for more than five years and is a veteran of two presidential campaigns of his own.
Among Republicans, 2016 is shaping up as a virtual re-run of 1964: a bitter conflict over whether the party should have a conservative or a broad-based appeal, accompanied by a secondary debate about whether the party prospers when it nominates a genuine conservative (Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1980, Gov. George W. Bush in 2000, both of whom became two-term chief executives) or when it nominates a more establishment figure (Sen. Robert J. Dole in 1996, Sen. John McCain in 2008, and former Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012, all of whom lost the White House by large margins.)
The conservatives tend not to mention 1964 itself, when Goldwater lost all but six states to Johnson. But 1964 has real relevance. In the ashes of Goldwater's loss was the fire that lit modern conservatism, and Reagan's late-campaign speech in behalf of Goldwater launched a political career that would take the former actor to the California governor's chair two years later and to the presidency 16 years later.
This 58th election will have its own rhythms and its own melody. But it already has overtones of 1964–and victory two years from now may come from the party that best teases out the lessons from a half century ago.
David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.