BG gets excited about a job he didn't even want.
- Okay, right off the bat, let's be clear on one thing: Barry Goldwater may have found Pat Nixon charming, but he and Richard Nixon were not good friends, nor did Barry think Nixon was a particularly great Republican.
- But you can't say that when you're being nominated to run for president, even when you're known around town as a straight-shooter, so the nominee starts off with a friendly hey-there for his frenemy before bestowing some genuine love on his running mate Bill Miller and Bill's wife.
- Other shout-outs go to Senator Thurston Morton from Kentucky, former POTUS Herbert Hoover (who passed away less than three months after this speech was given), another former president Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife, Barry's own wife Peggy, his family, all the Republicans gathered there, all the Republicans not gathered there, and pretty much every other person in the country.
- That's a pretty big shout-out. Like, all of that was in one sentence. One. Sentence.
- In the second sentence, we move on from the world's biggest shout-out to the get-pumped portion of the speech.
- We're "united and determined," Goldwater tells us, and we're "dedicated to the ultimate and undeniable greatness of the whole man" (2). And furthermore, we're gonna win this election.
- He tells his audience that he's humbly accepting their nomination, and that he wouldn't be able to bear such a great responsibility without the support of his party.
- This is his uniting paragraph: the battle to the nomination had been fierce, and ideological battles between him and his major opponents had dominated the primary season.
- But now he wants everyone to put all that behind them and support him in his quest for the Presidency.
- There are no guarantees in life, he tells us, but the Republicans deserve victory—"and victory will be ours" (8).