ABSTRACT
The election of 1964 would focus on the relation of righteousness to power. A national newcomer from Arizona, Senator Barry Goldwater, would pose that challenge in stark black and white. The contest would throw into clear relief the major and divergent branches of the politics of conscience in their modern ideological configurations. In that test, the moralistic version of politics in America would exhibit most luxuriantly its capacity to drift beyond political sanity. Goldwater exemplified the political moralist cut loose from the moorings of political reality. Johnson would come to illustrate most starkly the lock-step perseveration of the "practical" President, immersed in intense dutiful effort, who loses sight of the purpose and meaning of his labors. The Presidency was on its way to its twentieth-century nadir, the downhill slide to Nixon in 1968. Barry Goldwater's conscience-fraught crusade greased the skids.
