Why He Is Losing

October 26, 1964

On the basis of the polls, Barry Goldwater will not only be defeated by a landslide popular vote on Nov. 3 but the Republican representation in Congress will be cut down substantially even from its present minority level.

It is instructive to look at the reasons why this result is probable.

1—The country is enjoying a period of unparalleled prosperity, which heavily favors the party in power.

2—Enormous prestige always surrounds the man who holds the office and title of President. His every word and action command publicity. In addition, President Johnson enjoys an almost unique advantage. In office less than a year, he has become the beneficiary of the Kennedy achievements without getting any blame for the Kennedy errors—in the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, Vietnam, or the steel-price episode.

3—In addition to the prestige of the office, there is the unparalleled power that the Presidency now commands, particularly when combined with party Congressional control. Unwelcome investigations into corruption can be blocked or broken off. A tremendous bureaucracy that owes its appointment or continuance in office to the President can be drawn upon to denounce all criticism. Part of this bureaucracy—e.g., the State and Defense Departments—has access to information unavailable to the opposition. These departments can say that the truth is so-and-so; that the opposition’s charges are “irresponsible,” and that it is not in the public interest that the issue raised should be publicly discussed at all. The challenger is seldom in position to make a convincing reply.

4—The greatest means of mass communication today, the radio and television, which depend on the Federal government for their licenses and their continuance, will tend, with whatever technical “neutrality,” to be overwhelmingly on the side of the President and party in power.

5—When any party has been in power for four years, its flood of messages, speeches, press conferences, and laws establish an ideology that puts the main burden of proof on any opposing ideology. Vested interests are built up in all directions, from war contracts to social security.

6—There is a deep split in the Republican Party, partly caused by Governor Rockefeller’s frustrated ambitions but mainly the result of a profound division of opinion between “conservatives” and “liberals.”

7—Finally we come to the conduct of the campaign itself. Mr. Johnson is a political master, with an uncanny sense of the most effective act or phrase. At least until the Jenkins episode, he had not made a single major political error. Senator Goldwater, on the other hand, has been inept both in choosing issues and in stating them. His positions on dealing with the Communists, on the U.N., on control of the nuclear bomb, on social security, have been grossly misrepresented. But he has been partly responsible for this misunderstanding by his own ambiguities and belated qualifications. He has been too often content with vague generalities. His attacks (and phrasing) have been haphazard. He has not seemed to understand the need for specifying, documenting, and nailing down the details of his case.

8—Above all, he has until now let the case on economic issues—the case for free enterprise, and against inflation, deficits, spending, the monster paternalistic state—practically go by default. In the Oct. 11 issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Prof. Milton Friedman made a brilliant defense of what he assumed Senator Goldwater’s economic philosophy to be. No similar clear and detailed statement has so far come in this campaign from speeches by the senator himself. Yet if the Johnson-Humphrey ticket and the Democrats in general win by the margins that now seem likely, the result is sure to be interpreted as a popular endorsement of more inflation, deficits, spending, paternalism, and more “wars on poverty.”

Unless Barry Goldwater starts spelling out in detail, right now, the case against the Johnson-Humphrey fiscal, monetary, and economic policies—cheap money and chronic inflationary deficits that threaten the dollar, handouts to every pressure group—the prospect of an election result that will discourage these policies is not bright.