Conservative readers will cringe at the missed opportunities and wrongheaded tactics the scattered and mismanaged themes, including Goldwater's crippling clarion call for extremism the extremists who embraced him and the backroom machinations and supporters that in many ways created Goldwater. By casting the senator as the long-term winner, Perlstein's chronicle vindicates what appears to have been Goldwater's magnificently ham-handed campaign. What's more important about Perlstein's argument is its subtext.
But Goldwater's politics were vindicated, Perlstein argues, by subsequent elections, especially Reagan's in 1980, and his tenets are championed today on both sides of the aisle. In the 1964 presidential campaign, LBJ ate Barry Goldwater for lunch and thereby, according to the pundits, stuck a fork in the heart of American conservatism.
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