Rumblings of a brokered Republican convention are on the rise. Mitt Romney has done his best to squash that kind of talk to no avail. Rick Santorum himself now seems to be fanning the flames, saying the odds “are increasing” for a brokered convention.
“The convention will nominate a conservative,” Santorum said on the Sunday morning show circuit. “They will not nominate the establishment moderate candidate from Massachusetts. When we nominate moderates, when we nominate a Tweedledum versus Tweedledee, we don’t win elections.”
Republicans went down this road in 1964, and it didn’t turn out so well for them. msnbc’s Chuck Todd walked us down GOP memory lane on his show today.
Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, a staunch conservative, and an army of right-wingers staged a coup, of sorts, to sweep up the presidential nomination. His opponent Nelson Rockefeller, a more liberal Republican from the east coast, tried to label Goldwater as an “extremist.” Sound familiar? You could literally Photoshop the faces of 2012 candidates over the talking heads on TV from 1964.
President Lyndon Johnson beat Goldwater by a landslide, successfully capitalizing on the drawn out drama within the Republican Party. The very wise Chuck Todd warned, “When you have ideological fights inside the nominating process, you are dooming yourself for the general election.” He said, “It’s hard to imagine how you unite the party and not give the opposing party the opportunity to run against that dysfunction.”
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