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  • 2016-01-19 (xsd:date)
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  • Goldwater Girl (de)
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  • Despite her current status as a Democratic icon, former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state, and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had some significant exposure to conservative politics in her youth. In her autobiography Living History, Clinton described her father as a rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican and proud of it and noted that she had been a Young Republican and a supporter of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, the most prominent conservative Republican of his era, during Goldwater's (failed) 1964 presidential campaign against incumbent Lyndon Johnson: Hillary Clinton didn't last long on that side of the political spectrum, however, reporting that By the time I was a college junior, I had gone from being a Goldwater Girl to supporting the [1968] anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy. The meme shown above (circulated on social media in conjunction with the Martin Luther King Day holiday) plays on that brief period of Ms. Clinton's early political interest, claiming that she both actively campaigned and voted for Goldwater, a candidate who sought to overturn the Civil Rights Act and re-segregate the nation. Those statements are highly exaggerated versions of what Clinton and Goldwater actually thought and did, however. Although Hillary Clinton may have been a Goldwater supporter in 1964, saying she actively campaigned for him implies a more substantive role than the one she actually played. She was a mere 16-year-old who wasn't a member of the Goldwater campaign staff in any way, nor did she even meet the candidate — she related in Living History that she had to persuade her father to drive her and a friend to hear Goldwater speak when the GOP nominee made a campaign swing by train through the Chicago suburbs. And although Hillary Clinton might have wanted to vote for Barry Goldwater in 1964, the fact is that she didn't: she turned 17 just a few weeks before the election and thus wasn't eligible to vote for anyone, as the minimum voting age at the time was 21. Likewise, although Barry Goldwater famously voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the Senate (one of six Republicans to do so), he was no opponent of civil rights who sought to re-segregate the nation. Goldwater had supported earlier attempts to pass civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960, as well as the 24th Amendment (which outlawed poll taxes that disenfranchised Southern black voters), and his stated opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which he otherwise favored) was based on his belief that two portions of the bill regulating the behavior of private enterprise were unconstitutional, would be unenforceable without a federal police force, and would lead to the creation of racial quotas and affirmative action: Although Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a senator, we found no record of his having vowed to overturn it as a presidential candidate. (en)
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