This Party, its good people, and its unquestionable devotion to freedom, will not fulfill the purposes of this campaign which we launch here now until our cause has won the day, inspired the world, and shown the way to a tomorrow worthy of all our yesteryears.

I repeat, I accept your nomination with humbleness, with pride, and you and I are going to fight for the goodness of our land. Thank you. (140-142)

We'd like to take this opportunity to talk about sandwiches.

But we're not just talking about any old sandwiches here. We're talking about the perfect sandwich: maybe some smoked turkey, a couple slices of bacon, some delicious gouda melted just perfectly under a medley of fresh, scrumptious vegetables… Spread on some mayo and mustard, sprinkle that puppy with seasoning goodness, and we've got ourselves one fantastic sandwich.

In fact, the only less-than-exceptional part of our delicious, delicious sammie is the bread holding it all together.

Barry Goldwater's acceptance speech is kind of like our sandwich.

The beginning and the end aren't bad, don't get us wrong. They're just a little bland, especially compared to the exciting turkey-bacon-gouda innards.

This speech has some incredibly powerful language in it, and it had a ginormous transformative effect on its party. But then we get to the wrap-up, and suddenly… meh. It's like the last few sentences of this speech could be tacked onto the end of pretty much any nomination acceptance speech, regardless of party, and no one would know the difference.

Maybe it's hard to write an ending that tops Cicero paraphrases and "human causes for very humane goals" (138). Or maybe the writers thought the speech itself would cause enough excitement as it was and it didn't require a thrilling conclusion.

Whatever the reasoning, these final lines definitely aren't the most memorable of the speech.

We'd say more, but those last few paragraphs made us hungry—gonna go make a sandwich.