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JACK LUDWIG
ton and New York, got exactly what Goldwater promised-a win. The
vulgar TV bloodletting of Nelson Rockefeller was essential: "Here–
have a go at him-we told you the Eastern Big Shots were nothing."
The Convention
The moderates couldn't believe their tabulators. For three or four
years Goldwater worked the states in which Republican voters were
not much more numerous than the delegates. But a Southern or Far
Western delegate's vote
counted
in San Francisco.
The A.P. score kept mounting. Long before the convention
it
reached 600, then 700. The moderates didn't believe Goldwater could
hold that number
because the conservatives never had held together be–
fore.
What they ignored was that same
win
factor. Those who backed
Goldwater in a state contest, and won, were easily convinced that back–
ing him in San Francisco would also win.
The key to the movement, the convention, the campaign, is
local control.
Just as lobbyists switched pressure from Washington to
campaign contributors in congressional districts so Goldwater has been
successful district by district, precinct by precinct, block by block. The
"States' Rights" cry is not only an essential part of the philosophy East
and North as well as West and South, it's even more essential as strategy
and tactics. Return power to the locality, goes the conservative message,
because in the precinct we have our now newly-requited hard core.
Don't laugh at the old ladies in tennis shoes: how many stores invaded
by them still have Polish hams on the shelf? How does it happen that
year in, year out, school bond items in child-teeming, affluent, com–
muter communities around New York and other large cities are defeated?
Someone
merged the old ladies with the serious young boys of the
campus conservative clubs;
someone
told the delegates to submerge
during hearings on the platform and then bust loose when Nelson
Rockefeller tried to speak;
someone
planted twelve Goldwaterites on
the thirty-man steering committee of Governor Scranton;
someone
saw
the necessity of not compromising one comma with the moderates, and
jamming the nation's least attractive vice-presidential candidate down
their Brooks Brothers-collared throats. The worm turned. The Rightists
had their big last laugh. Who, four years ago, would have predicted
that the ex-PR man entrusted with writing part of the platform for a
major political party in 1964 would be James Burnham?
The Campaign
The tactics that 'won delegates will be used to try to win an
election. Doorbells will be rung with
.one issue per house:
the Commies