Anyone who thinks that this campaign is the nastiest in history doesn’t have a very long memory. \u00a0In 1964, Lyndon Johnson ran the sort of bare-knuckles campaign against Barry Goldwater that we associate more with the 1860s than the 1960s. \u00a0After all, wasn’t there a centrist consensus in place? \u00a0Perhaps, and perhaps Goldwater’s threat to that consensus accounts for the ferocity of the attacks Johnson leveled against him.<\/p>\n
Goldwater’s campaign ads were often long and thoughtful, and rarely mentioned Johnson by name.<\/p>\n
But Goldwater tried to make an issue out of American defense posture vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, arguing that a harder public line would be in the country’s best interest. \u00a0And his vote against the 1964 Civil Right Act, combined with an undesired and uninvited endorsement by the KKK – still a power in Southern politics at that time – allowed Johnson to portray him as an extremist who\u00a0would get our children killed in a nuclear war, but not before poisoning them with radiation. \u00a0Johnson’s aide Bill Moyers deftly parodied Goldwater’s campaign slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” with, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”<\/p>\n
In that respect, Johnson’s campaign prefigured Obama’s effort to paint Mitt Romney as extreme, this time pivoting on women’s reproductive justice, or whatever they’re calling mandatory employer-funded birth control pills, and Romney’s desire to cut taxes.<\/p>\n
Thanks to the good folks over at the Museum of the Moving Image<\/a>, we can see that except for the 1960s production values, Johnson’s ads could have been made this year. \u00a0Consider this one using Goldwater’s own words against him, out of context, of course:<\/p>\n