The great Sen. Jeff Sessions, long my favorite U.S. Senator, has a USA Today op-ed (“Election offers a simple choice”):
For the first time in a long time, this November will give Americans a clear choice on perhaps the most important issue facing our country and our civilization: whether we remain a nation-state that serves its own people, or whether we slide irrevocably toward a soulless globalism that treats humans as interchangeable widgets in the world market.
In Donald Trump, we have a forceful advocate for America. Trump has said that our trade, immigration and foreign policies must be changed to protect the interests of American workers and our nation.
Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan discusses the analogy with Goldwater’s defeat in ’64:
Two years later, Nixon won the presidency, inaugurating an era in which Republicans won five out of six presidential contests, two by 49-state landslides.
Out of Goldwater’s defeat came the New Majority and Reagan Revolution…
While the Goldwater campaign, as an insurgency of outsiders, bears comparison with Trump’s, in other ways it does not.
Goldwater never compiled anything near the vote that Trump did. At this point in 1964, Goldwater was behind Johnson 79-18 in the Gallup poll. Trump is behind Hillary Clinton by single digits. New polls have him running even in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania.
Now, consider the issues comparison with 1964.
In July 1964, Johnson signed the popular Civil Rights Act that Goldwater had opposed. The GOP convention in San Francisco revealed a deeply divided party, subject to the charge, validated by the rule-or-ruin Rockefeller-Romney faction, that it was receptive to right-wing radicals.
Lyndon Johnson’s decision to bomb North Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident made him a war leader, and Americans rally to presidents in a time of war.
In 2016, however, Trump holds a fistful of face cards. After eight years of President Obama, he is the candidate of change in 2016, and Clinton is the candidate of same…
Other than that she would be the first woman president, what is there about her or her agenda that has popular appeal? That lack of appeal explains why her crowds are a fraction of Bernie Sanders’.
The Clinton of 2016 is not the Clinton of 2008.