Sarah Palin Makes Forbes’ Powerful Women List in ‘Lifestyle’ Category

Sometimes I think Wonketteer camp would just be a nice way to end it all. Alaska's too cold, though. If we're going to be doomed to a crazy state, Florida's got beaches. We can swim to Cuba for healthcare, food and the revolution.

Wrong answer:

Policies

Goldwater soon became most associated with labor-union reform and anti-communism; he was an active supporter of the conservative coalition in Congress. However, he rejected the wilder fringes of the anti-communist movement; in 1956 he sponsored the passage through the Senate of the final version of the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act, despite vociferous opposition from opponents who claimed that the Act was a communist plot to establish concentration camps in Alaska. His work on labor issues led to Congress passing major anti-corruption reforms in 1957, and an all-out campaign by the AFL-CIO to defeat his 1958 reelection bid. He voted against the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, but he was much more prudent than McCarthy and never actually charged any individual with being a communist/Soviet agent. Goldwater emphasized his strong opposition to the worldwide spread of communism in his 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative. The book became an important reference text in conservative political circles.

In 1964, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that emphasized "states' rights."[15] Goldwater's 1964 campaign was a magnet for conservatives since he opposed interference by the federal government in state affairs. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation and had supported the original senate version of the bill, Goldwater made the decision to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His stance was based on his view that the act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and, second, that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose.[16]

All this appealed to white Southern Democrats, and Goldwater was the first Republican to win the electoral votes of the Deep South states (Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina) since Reconstruction. However, Goldwater's vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign everywhere outside the South (besides Dixie, Goldwater won only in Arizona, his home state), contributing to his landslide defeat in 1964. A Lyndon B. Johnson ad, called "Confessions of a Republican," which ran in the North, associated Goldwater with the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, Johnson’s campaign in the Deep South emphasized Goldwater’s full history on and previous support for civil rights. In the end, Johnson swept the election.

While Goldwater had been depicted by his opponents in the Republican primaries as a representative of a conservative philosophy that was extreme and alien, his Congressional voting records show that his positions were in harmony with those of his fellow Republicans in the Congress. What distinguished him from his predecessors was, according to Hans J. Morgenthau, his firmness of principle and determination, which did not allow him to be content with mere rhetoric.[17]

Goldwater fought in 1971 to stop U.S. funding of the United Nations after the People's Republic of China was admitted to the organization. He said:

"I suggested on the floor of the Senate today that we stop all funds for the United Nations. Now, what that'll do to the United Nations, I don't know. I have a hunch it would cause them to fold up, which would make me very happy at this particular point. I think if this happens, they can well move their headquarters to Peking or Moscow and get 'em out of this country."[18]