Warren Throckmorton reprises some of the advertisements and film clips that aired during the Johnson/Goldwater debacle of 1964, adding:
I hope the GOP doesn’t repeat the past this year. As a lifelong Republican who was a child when Goldwater lost, I don’t recognize the party of my lifetime. My more liberal friends will tell me that I have been in a fog, but I say Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be in the majority among today’s GOP rank and file.
This man scares me. I think my party made a mistake.
I’ve made the point repeatedly over the past year that the modern Republican Party wouldn’t even consider nominating its former icons … Reagan, Eisenhower, Roosevelt — not one of them would enjoy any success today. It probably is too glib to say, at least amongst political scientists and historians, but the gist of the matter is that the parties have switched places. The pragmatic, educated, forward-looking realists who were once the Republicans have become the Democrats, and it is no coincidence that Trump’s victories yesterday gave him the suite of states that George Wallace claimed in 1968.
The great difference between now and 1964 is that the opposition party had a plausible candidate, Lyndon Johnson. This time around, the opposition party has Hillary Clinton — loathed by the Republicans, and trusted by nobody — and pie-in-the-sky Bernie. If Trump can keep his mouth shut long enough for a majority of the United States of Amnesia to forget that he is a vain, egomaniacal, cartoon-Mussolini, the Republic could be in real trouble.