In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts

Thomas Sugrue

• BuyThe Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater
  Princeton, 144 pp, £8.95, June 2007, ISBN 978 0 691 13117 7

In 2004, with the re-election of George W. Bush, the Republicans seemed invincible. Bush’s consigliere, Karl Rove, interpreted the election as the sign of a realignment and pushed for a hyperconservative politics which would create a ‘permanent Republican majority’. Now, only three years later, in the midst of America’s absurdly long presidential election cycle, the Grand Old Party is in disarray. Two of its leading contenders – Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney – come from states that are among the most liberal in the country. Both have long records of supporting issues anathema to their party’s right-wing base. If either the twice-divorced New Yorker or the Mormon from ‘Taxachusetts’ wins the Republican nomination, fundamentalist Christian leaders have threatened to form a third party. The other frontrunner, Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, is making inroads among his fellow creationists and millennialists, but has deviated from hardline Republican positions on taxes and immigration.