Word: novak
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...Robert Novak's The Agony of the G.O.P. 1964 explains more exhaustively how the political market mechanism went awry. He goes back to 1960 and follows the machinations of the whole cast of G.O.P. characters in intrepid, eye-at-the-keyhole style...
Nelson Rockefeller's remarriage, in Novak's opinion, was the event that threw the market mechanism most violently out of whack. It removed Rockefeller from the number one position in the race and, more important, showed just how lukewarm his support had been all along...
Rockefeller's--and all "liberal" Republicans'--basic political strategy is, as Novak puts it, expediential. The liberal asks, and gets, support from conservative bedrock Republicans because he can win and they can't. But the hardy 27 per cent of American voters who still call themselves Republicans don't really trust Rockefeller or his kind. The difficulties governors like Rockefeller, Scranton, and Romney have had with the Republican majorities in their legislatures--to say nothing of the disagreements between the Eisenhower Administration and the G.O.P. leadership in Congress--show what different political worlds these Republicans live...
...both Rovere and Novak, from their different perspectives, suggest that it was no such thing. For them, the San Francisco convention was a plausible, if unusual, product of the political market mechanism, the result of varying proportions of stupidity and astute planning plus a few unpredictable contingencies. Despite Goldwater's blunders and speech writers, despite all the primary results, the Arizonian ambled downhill to the nomination after Rockefeller's remarriage. It was Clifton White's roundup of 300 solidly Goldwater delegates (with 655 needed to nominate) plus the Goldwater victory (and 86 votes) in California that corralled the convention...
...this is true, it says something about the character of the Republican national convention delegate. Since San Francisco, commentators have stressed the uniqueness of the 1964 delegates' strident, unswerving commitment to Goldwater. But if Novak is right, if only 386 of the delegates were irrevocably tied to Goldwater, then what may be important about the convention is its similarity to the supposedly liberal conventions of previous years...