corrente

When Goldwater observed the right trying to use government to enforce private morality, he spoke up for women's right to abortion and gay rights. His wife insisted that his convictions had remained unaltered, but that the movement for which he was the avatar had become warped. "[Goldwater] hated it that the rightwing zealots took over the party," she said.

Perhaps widow Goldwater speaks for a man who can no longer speak for himself. But it is inarguable that it's Arizona - bastion of conservatism - along with the other southwest states of New Mexico and Nevada which are, far more than those of the deep south, the battlegrounds in the forthcoming presidential election. For they may vote Democrat.

The Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, told me: "Yes, we can win Arizona." Napolitano is a former Clinton appointee as US attorney and was elected Arizona's attorney general; young, energetic and politically adroit. The contradictions of conservatism that have led to her becoming governor are now widening. ...

[T]he Arizona state legislature is led by the draconian speaker Jake Flake. When one moderate Republican representative voted for the governor's programme for basic children's services, he was stripped of his committee chairmanship. The conservatives at the statehouse are known as the "Kool-Aid Drinkers", after the religious cultists who committed mass suicide, while the few remaining moderate Republicans call themselves the "Mushroom Coalition" - kept in the dark and covered with excrement.

Napolitano suggests that the Republican right's one-party arbitrary power in government and authoritarianism toward women and minorities is an appeal to the independent streak among Arizonans that can only favour the Democratic candidate. The same sentiment that once created Goldwater now supports the Republican maverick John McCain, who holds Goldwater's seat in the US Senate. And it could flow in new directions that Goldwater himself may have anticipated. In his old age, he continued to play the prophet. Will Goldwater's legacy of liberty turn on Bush, who is campaigning as its fulfilment? In this Tombstone, Bush may find himself at the wrong end of the OK Corral.