Republicans: This President Thing

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"Those Guys Around Him." As for the New Frontier's economic policies, Conservative Goldwater thinks that the business community "doesn't follow the Administration at all. The only business people Kennedy can siphon off to follow him are some of the big businessmen who play both sides of the fence, who are gutless enough that the dollar is more important to them than principle, so that they cuddle up to whoever's in. Now Kennedy himself is a hell of a lot more conservative than those guys around him, but it's another case in which the President can't make up his own mind. So he listens to what they tell him, and in his public utterances he indicates that he believes in Keynes, that he believes the Federal Government can prevent depressions by monkeying with the economy, that Government spending can solve economic problems-air this in the face of fundamental facts which prove that this isn't right, and never was. Why, you can't credit Kennedy and the New Frontier with modern economic thinking-they're reactionaries. These things they're endorsing were tried back in the '30s and failed even then."

The Goldwater approach? "Well, we have to increase capital investment. The immediate need is for 'correction' in the tax code-not cuts. We need even more liberal depreciation allowances, and we need to broaden the tax base so that we can draw what money the Federal Government needs from a wider range and then reduce the tax rates. That would then leave more leeway for local and state governments to tax more, and set up local programs where needed instead of all this federal welfare-state stuff. The whole reason that we are a federal republic is that it was recognized in the Constitution that the powers not specifically granted to the Federal Government remain with the states. Now you can't let the central Government start controlling your economy without having it control the lives and actions of your people-without having it control your freedoms. I just don't believe that the states are so ignorant that they can't fill the needs of the people without the central Government getting into it."

Such sentiments have a fine, straightforward ring to them. But there are charges that Goldwater oversimplifies issues, that he has not really thought very profoundly about the practical ways of carrying out the principles which he endorses so strongly. It is the fear that Goldwater, notwithstanding his strong character, does not have the intellectual qualities to become an effective U.S. President that bothers many Republicans far more than his right-wing conservatism. A Western Republican Governor sums up such doubts about Goldwater: "He's got guts, but no depth."