By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — When 20th-century conservative standard-bearer Barry Goldwater began his campaign as the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, he went to the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse, about an hour and a half north of Phoenix and a mile high, up in the mountain town of Prescott, Ariz.
The courthouse in Prescott had been Goldwater’s traditional location to kick off his previous U.S. Senate races.
When 2016 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump made an early October Arizona speech, he went a few miles to the east, to Prescott Valley, a separate town with a population about the same size as Prescott’s, also estimated at about 42,000 people as of last year.
Trump warned a packed auditorium on October 4 against voting for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who, Trump said, is “totally stuck in the past.” She’s “four more years of (Barack) Obama, and we can’t take that.”
Later that same evening, the GOP’s Mike Pence and his Democratic foe, Tim Kaine, would face off in Farmville, Va., for the only scheduled vice-presidential debate of this campaign season.
Kaine showed the Democratic Party is stuck in the past a lot further back than four or eight years. He suggested that Trump could bring on a nuclear war, causing Pence to chide Kaine for such a low blow.
Earlier in the debate, Kaine said he and his wife would trust Clinton as commander-in-chief, but the thought of Trump in that role “scares us to death.”
As it happened, only the previous week, Hillary Clinton, at her first presidential debate against Trump, suggested that Trump could be comfortable with nuclear war.
These Democrats always seem on home territory as they burrow toward new depths in the gutter. Or maybe they’re tunneling for a bomb shelter. But neither Kaine’s nor Clinton’s assertion that Trump could make a mushroom cloud was original.
More than a half-century ago, back in 1964, the campaign of Democrat President Lyndon Johnson — who later would be driven from office for his wavering command of the Vietnam War — painted presidential nominee Goldwater as bringing on, of course, nuclear war.
A famous television commercial of that time showed a little girl picking the petals off a daisy in a field, soon enveloped in a nuclear cloud.
Another 1964 commercial showed a girl licking an ice cream cone, accompanied by an adult voice warning that a man named Barry Goldwater wanted to set off nuclear explosions.
Each of the disgusting commercials ended with a stern voice saying, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”
However, if there was a wild-eyed man the night of the October 4 veep debate in Virginia, it appeared to be Kaine, aggressively interrupting Pence time after time to prevent the Indiana governor from making his points.
Kaine’s negative performance drew wide scorn. But it was perfectly consistent with one aspect of the Obama administration’s record of liberal political elitists: Trying to browbeat or silence conservatives who dare disagree. Kaine’s recurring arched eyebrows and arrogant smirk should serve as more than a mild warning of what a Hillary White House would bring.
An analyst at the liberal UK Guardian was hardly alone in judging Pence the clear winner: “Kaine attempted to act like a bulldog . . . but instead came across as a nipping Chihuahua. . . . Kaine’s constant ‘I know it all’ interruptions might be considered the 2016 version of Al Gore’s groans. It made him come across as a thoroughly unlikable figure. . . .
“Pence won the debate by a landslide, and it’s hard to imagine there will be many in the media who will even attempt to claim otherwise,” this analysis concluded.
Well, that may be expecting too much from a dominantly anti-Trump media that will do about anything to defeat him.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign’s strategy sometimes has left observers wondering if he knows enough to win the White House, but the billionaire’s devoting time even to making small-town stops this late in the race seemed to bring notable results.
As long as he has cameras with him, as an observer noted.
From October 3 through 5, he was skipping through Loveland and Pueblo, Colo., Prescott Valley, and Henderson and Reno, Nevada.
The 7,500 free tickets for the rural Arizona rally were all claimed by the day before he spoke. Trump told the rally that thousands more were outside the full-up Prescott Valley Event Center and watching on a big screen. It was early afternoon on a Tuesday workday, but Trump scored a significant turnout.
This big-skies location is in the Bradshaw Mountains, more than a two-hour drive south of the Grand Canyon.
Trump touched a number of familiar themes, including border security, Hillary Clinton’s lawbreaking and international chaos-creation, the need to improve the U.S. economy, and to appoint Supreme Court justices to uphold the Constitution.
“Our border is wide open, and drugs and criminal cartels are pouring in,” he said, adding that no one knows that better than Arizonans.
Later in the rally, which lasted 61 minutes, Trump said that never in history has a country surrendered so much of its wealth as the U.S. has to foreign countries.
People right there in the event center, he said, were making more money working one job 18 years ago than they are today, working two or three jobs. “We’ve rebuilt other countries at the expense of our own.”
He lauded progress in Mexico, but doesn’t want the U.S. itself to suffer.
“Mexico is like the eighth wonder of the world in terms of the factories they’re building,” Trump said. “. . .We want Mexico to do great, but it has to be a two-way highway. . . .
“Illegal immigration costs our country more than $113 billion a year,” he said, adding that the money could be spent in much better ways here.
“I’m not running to be president of the world. I’m running to be president of the United States. America first,” Trump said.
Drawing to his conclusion, the billionaire said, “You’re going to look back at this rally for the rest of your life….This is a movement like nobody has ever seen before. . . . And a vote for me is really and truly a vote for you.”
Later that day, at the vice-presidential debate, the tightly scripted, imperious Kaine rushed through so many stale talking points that he seemed like a high-school novice orator rather than an experienced speaker.
And Kaine quickly tumbled into the trap of political correctness, asserting early on that he would be President Hillary’s “right-hand person.”
There are times when the genderless “person” is a better usage, but because Kaine was talking about himself, it sounded foolish, as some noted, that he hadn’t called himself the “right-hand man.” Or had the domineering Hillary already neutered him?
Contrary to Kaine’s claim that Clinton’s political record is something to be proud of, Pence pointed out that she left entire portions of the world “spinning out of control” when serving Obama. Later, Pence added that “America is less safe today than when Barack Obama became president.”
Heading toward a conclusion, debate moderator Elaine Quijano, of CBS News, raised the social issues. Which is to say, permissive abortion.
Like a true left-wing Democrat, who’s willing to hammer his own views about everything else down everyone’s throat, Kaine inaccurately portrayed opposition to abortion as only the stand of “one religion,” which shouldn’t be imposed on others.
Pence said he had a great deal of respect for Kaine’s faith, but pointed to the importance of the sanctity of life, despite the Democratic Party’s even supporting partial-birth abortion and tax funding for permissive abortion.
As Pence cited Mother Teresa’s counsel to welcome children into the world, the callous, smirking, bad Catholic Kaine once more interrupted him to deliver the hoary Planned Parenthood line to “trust women” about choosing abortion.
Pence said a society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable, the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn.
Kaine, of course, doesn’t want to “trust women” to decide about abortion. He wants to see them hustled into churning abortion clinics after being denied the information they need. They can spend the rest of their lives in regret, while PP stuffs his campaign coffers with cash.
The strong performance by Pence at this debate would, it is to be hoped, augur well for his working with Trump truly to turn around this nation. Starting with reforming a Republican Party establishment that likes current business as usual just fine.
The “Senate Conservatives” organization was among activist groups recently calling attention to how the GOP-controlled Congress had just given liberal Democrats all they wanted in a “continuing resolution” for more spending.
“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) tried to describe the bill as ‘clean,’ but there is nothing clean about a bill that funds the president’s refugee program, Planned Parenthood, sanctuary cities, and Obamacare,” “Senate Conservatives” said.
No Backbone
The Wanderer asked conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard about such a development possibly discouraging Republican voters this November.
Querard replied that “the Republican majority rarely demonstrates any real backbone in Washington, D.C., and they’re not particularly concerned about motivating GOP voters. Two-thirds of the Senate isn’t up for re-election, and most of the senators who are up face no real challenge at the polls.
“Additionally, most Republicans who do consider the political consequences of their votes have concluded that they risk more opposing Obama than caving to him,” Querard said.
“Finally, contrary to the election-year rhetoric you hear from them, most Republican senators are not truly conservative, so their votes are not inconsistent with their beliefs.”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress