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  • 2016-03-09 (xsd:date)
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  • 'Confessions of a Republican' (en)
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  • On 8 March 2016, the Facebook page for the web site Quartz shared a video called Confessions of a Republican, which was originally a political advertisement from 1964. The clip rapidly gained traction, and along with it skepticism that the viewpoints expressed too neatly echoed political schisms debated during the 2016 election: The speaker (actor Bill Bogert) discussed his lifelong identity as a loyal Republican voter before expressing reservations about the candidacy of then-Senator Barry Goldwater, who unsuccessfully challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Among the concerns he aired (the ad's full text is at the bottom of the page) were what he described as a tendency of Goldwater to rapidly reverse position or deny statements on key issues, as well as a hawkish attitude during a point in American history when the specter of nuclear destruction loomed: That portion alone drew comparisons to a fluctuating GOP identity in 2016, as well as objections raised about Donald Trump within the Republican party. Another excerpt paralleled former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke's endorsement of Trump in February 2016: Bogert concluded by saying that he planned to vote against Goldwater on Election Day, and that his party made a mistake in its choice of nominee. A voiceover then urged viewers to vote for Johnson. While it's true many of the expressed sentiments echoed 2016 election rhetoric, the video was not a modern creation. The first appearance of it we found on the internet dated back to at least 2008 (clicking transcript revealed identical text to the video that circulated in 2016). The source for the earlier version was the Museum of the Moving Image, which exhaustively catalogued such media as part of an exhibit called The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2012: Remarks on the clip provided further context about the political climate in 1964: Film professor and author of the linked book (What’s Fair on the Air: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest) Heather Hendershot said in a 2011 Curator's Note: A 2010 blog post delved into the ad's historical relevance (describing Goldwater's campaign as a naked appeal to Southern white racists to bolt the Democratic Party and support the Republican Party). The article was written as race and racism once again became enormous issues in American politics following the 2008 election of the United States' first black president. In November 2014, the actor from the 1964 commercial was interviewed about the Confessions of a Republican ad: The interviewer noted that they had presumed that the actor in the Johnson campaign clip was a Democrat, but Bogert said that its producers required an actual Republican star in the spot: Not only was the Confessions of a Republican ad a legitimate archival clip from the 1964 campaign, but the actor depicted in it was himself a Republican, a casting prerequisite. The clip was likely scripted, but it was not a 2016 creation intended as a critique of the current political discourse. (en)
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