Same as it ever was: From Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump, “This man scares me.”

In 1964, this ad ran on behalf of Lyndon Johnson (h/t Alex Gourevitch). The man in the ad is a Republican (probably an actor) who can’t bring himself to vote for Goldwater. Because? He’s a “very different kind of man. This man scares me.” Sound familiar?

Here are some excerpts:

I certainly don’t feel guilty about being a Republican. I’ve always been a Republican. My father is, his father is, the whole family is a Republican family. I voted for Dwight Eisenhower the first time I ever voted, I voted for Nixon the last time. But when we come to Senator Goldwater, now it seems to me we’re up against a very different kind of a man. This man scares me. Now maybe I’m wrong. A friend of mine has said to me, listen, just because a man sounds a little irresponsible during a campaign doesn’t mean he’s going to act irresponsibly….

The hardest thing for me about this whole campaign is to sort out one Goldwater statement from another. A reporter will go to Senator Goldwater and he’ll say, Senator, on such and such a day, you said, and I quote, blah blah blah, whatever it is, end quote. And then Goldwater says, well, I wouldn’t put it that way. I can’t follow that. Was he serious when did put it that way? Is he serious when he says he wouldn’t put it that way? I just don’t get it….

When the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party, either they’re not Republicans or I’m not.

Have a listen.

 

5 Comments

  1. John March 4, 2016 at 11:18 pm | #

    The LBJ and neoliberal continuum of propaganda errs: Goldwater and Trump and Hilary are all different flavors of the same fascism. Some are just more pleasant to ones taste it would seem. Sorry Corey, but the comparison here is not merely across time but across the aisle,

  2. louisproyect March 4, 2016 at 11:29 pm | #

    Yeah, I got so scared by TV ads in 1964 that I made sure to vote for LBJ, especially the one in which a little girl is pulling the petals of a daisy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDTBnsqxZ3k

    So I dutifully voted for peace. What a schmuck I was to believe a commercial. That was my last vote for a Democrat. Fuck them all from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders, from Andrew Cuomo to Elizabeth Warren. This party has been around since Andrew Jackson’s March of Tears to the Slavocracy to Hiroshima to Vietnam. Enough is enough.

    • Tom March 5, 2016 at 12:29 am | #

      Yeah, right. Bring on the Drumpf.

      I’ll vote for the Dem, thank you.

  3. Matthew Walleser (@MatthewWalleser) March 4, 2016 at 11:42 pm | #

    Pop culture trivia: The actor is William Bogert, probably better known (to my generation, anyway) as playing the journalist in the Chappelle’s Show skit about the Black White Supremacist.

Leave a Reply