The target of the famous 1964 “Daisy” ad was Barry Goldwater, of course, but C.C. Goldwater and Tani Cohen‘s Mr. Conservative (’06) persuaded me that while Goldwater’s aggressive foreign policy instincts were extreme and that he was definitely wrong about mid ’60s Civil Rights legislation, he was a genuine Libertarian and therefore not too bad in certain respects. Also: To bend over backwards towards fairness, Donald Trump exclaiming that he’ll want the option of seeming unpredictable regarding nuclear weapons is a carbon copy of Richard Nixon‘s “Madman theory.” And keep in mind how Machiavelli once argued that it can sometimes be “a very wise thing to simulate madness.”
