Trump ’16 is like Goldwater ’64

“I think we’ll win before getting to the convention, but I can tell you, if we didn’t and if we’re 20 votes short or if we’re … you know, 100 short and we’re at 1,100 and somebody else is at 500 or 400, because we’re way ahead of everybody, I don’t think you can say that we don’t get it automatically. I think it would be — I think you’d have riots.”

So said Republican front-runner Donald Trump on CNN’s “New Day” the morning after he won Florida’s primary.

{mosads}What we have here is a situation resembling the 1964 GOP presidential primary race between Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and in the month before the convention in San Francisco, a last-minute “Stop Goldwater” candidacy by Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton. I was there.

Goldwater was the underdog, the outsider, the ultimate conservative. It had been my pleasure to spend 30 minutes with him alone in the University of Oregon library, where he was to be a speaker to a College Model United Nations conference at which I was a delegate. He was a terrific guy to talk to the year before he ran for president. I was mesmerized. He totally reinforced my political views that had been honed under President Eisenhower and pushed to the right a bit. The fact that he, an Air Force general, would even talk with me, a former U.S. Marine corporal, as if I were an equal, struck my political soul.

Then he did something that wiped out the profound like I had for him politically and personally. He and 21 other senators — mostly segregationist Southern senators — voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I could not support anyone that could vote against a law that would outlaw the very treatment I had experienced in Texas as a boy. I went to the 1964 convention as an aide to Sen. Thomas H. Kuchel (Calif.) who was leading the Stop Goldwater movement. At a meeting in the senator’s Fairmont Hotel suite, I listened to him thunder to movers-and-shakers at a backroom strategy meeting, minus the cigar smoke. His war cry: “We have enough power in this room to destroy Barry!”

After the meeting, several of the movers and shakers went to the Mark Hopkins Hotel to the famous “Top of the Mark” to scheme how to stop Goldwater from getting the Republican nomination. They took me along. In the elevator was California Gov. Pat Brown, who would later say, in reaction to Goldwater’s nomination, that “[t]he stench of fascism is in the air.” I agreed.

Fast-forward to today and I am involved in the 2016 presidential race, this time as an outsider, a published observer. This time, a terrible vote against civil rights is not the reason I reject Trump. This time I have myriad reasons; to wit:

Anyone who opposes free trade in general and specifically declares war on our next-door neighbor, the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world and our third-largest trade partner, a country from which the families of 35 million Americans originate, cannot ever win my vote. Anyone who threatens our next-door neighbor because a tiny sliver of our population has come here illegally from there, cannot get my support. Anyone who promises to forcefully round up millions of people and their American citizen children and deport them with a special “deportation force,” cannot get my support.

Anyone who approves banning certain reporters from his appearances cannot get my support. Anyone who encourages his followers to attack protesters and states that he will pay the legal fees of any of his followers who attack protesters, cannot get my support.

Anyone who threatens our next-door neighbor and American companies doing business there with a phone call, promising punishing tariffs, and who welcomes a trade war that would bankrupt American agriculture and throw millions of Americans out of work, cannot get my support.

If anyone is nominated who runs on these platform planks that I oppose, I will do what I did in 1964: vote for the winner while holding my nose. We corrected the 1964 mistake that many said would kill the Republican Party. Republicans won the 1966 off-year elections and the White House in 1968. The GOP can survive being hijacked for one cycle; we did it in the ’60s.

Like the late Yogi Berra once said, “It’s deja vu all over again.”

Contreras formerly wrote for the New American News Service of The New York Times Syndicate.