Barry Goldwater Quotes
I’d cut down government spending and I’d move to keep down the size of government, too.
Goldwater was the first Republican Presidential Candidate since the end of WWII who had campaigned for smaller government and reduced government spending. He actually started the modern Republican trend toward campaigning on this theme. Ronald Reagan did a much better job of campaigning on this theme, and all Republican Candidates since have campaigned on these two themes. It is not clear whether the Republicans were actually serious about this or just ran on the themes to please the political wing that Goldwater had started or meant it but were not good enough at running the government to fulfill this promise. Every Republican President from Reagan through George W. Bush increased the government spending and increased the number of government employees—more so than most Democrats ironically. Democratic President Bill Clinton was the only post WWII president to cut spending, produce a surplus and diminish the size of the government bureaucracy. Goldwater was so intellectually honest that had he won, he probably would have done everything he could to implement the policy of smaller government and less spending.
Barry Goldwater, 1909-1998, U. S. Senator (Republican, AZ), Republican Nominee for President, Campaign Speech and Advertisement, 1964
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Barry Morris Goldwater was an American politician, statesman, businessman, United States Air Force officer, and author who was a five-term Senator from Arizona (1953–1965, 1969–1987) and the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States in 1964. Goldwater is the politician most often credited with having sparked the resurgence of the American conservative political movement in the 1960s. Despite his loss of the 1964 presidential election in a landslide, many political pundits and historians believe he laid the foundation for the conservative revolution to follow, as the grassroots organization and conservative takeover of the Republican party began a long-term realignment in American politics helped to bring about the "Reagan Revolution" of the 1980s. He also had a substantial impact on the libertarian movement.
