Bearish Barry

Goldwater, who has been doing some low-key campaigning on his own of late, maintains that Romney is chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. "At this point," Barry told an interviewer in Washington last week, "I don't see any Republican beating Johnson. No one in recent times has beaten an incumbent President.* The Democrats still control the cities, and the appeal of the federal dollar is still powerful."

His own experience in 1964 makes Goldwater an expert on the political impact of the civil rights issue. Thus he was bearish about Romney's chances of disentangling himself in the public's mind from the Mormon doctrine on Negroes. "They can kill you," Goldwater said, "even though your civil rights record, like Romney's, is a good one." The only hope the Arizonan sees for any Republican in 1968 is if "Johnson fails in Viet Nam." Unlike Romney, however, Goldwater's view is that the war "actually seems to be going better now." Indeed, Barry has never had any difficulty figuring out his own view of Viet Nam. His prognosis is that any slowdown in the U.S. military effort would constitute a "sanity gap."

* The last Incumbent to lose was Herbert Hoover in 1932.

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