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A Choice Not an Echo: The inside story of how American Presidents are chosen

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Written in part to promote Republican Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, Schlafly's book is also an astounding revelation of back room politics. For decades, groups of industry leaders created a web of influence specifically designed to defraud the American people of free elections at the highest level. This book provides shocking insight,an important history lesson, and is a must read for anyone (of all political affilliations) interested in liberty and the right to a free society.

Phyllis Schlafly's book is a must read for those who believe feminists are nuts. A wonderful book.

It is one of the more delicious ironies of American politics that the reforms that were foisted upon the Democrats in 1972 by liberal activists
trying to nominate a candidate of the Left, reforms which then spread to the Republican Party in the wake of the Watergate scandals, have
had the opposite effect that their advocates intended. Loosening the powerbrokers grip on the nomination process has produced an
uninterrupted string of conservative Republican nominees and nearly thirty years of at least relatively conservative presidents, even though
Democrats have won three of those elections. This is not, of course, how it was supposed to work. The operating mythology held that it
was the evil men in the smoke-filled rooms who were forcing their reactionary minions down all of our throats, and, if only you could give
the people their choice, they'd go for progressives. Well, those reformers would have done well to read Phyllis Schlafly's A Choice Not an
Echo, before setting in motion a process which they didn't understand, but which she had clearly, if over dramatically, explained back during
the 1964 campaign.

What Ms Schlafly set out to demonstrate--and she succeeded to a considerable degree--was that the Eastern Establishment of the Republican
Party, with its money, access to the media and advertising expertise, had for years wielded an inordinate influence over who would be the
eventual presidential nominee every four years. At first blush this might seem to confirm the reformers intuition, but, as Ms Schlafly said,
what these men believed in was not conservative politics, as we understand it today, but their own rather large pocketbooks. This led them
to favor stability, domestic and global, above all other causes, and meant that they were de facto defenders of the New Deal and relentless
advocates of détente with the Soviets. Ideas were less important to them than not rocking the boat; the party line a distant second to the
bottom line. In their own strange way, they had become allies of the Democratic Party, which by the early 1970s had taken the nation a long
way toward socialism at home, acceptance of communism as a legitimate system abroad, and an increasingly demoralized and relativistic
culture. Thus, the party paraded out a cavalcade of "me-tooers"--nominees like Wendell Wilkie, Tom Dewey, Eisenhower, and Nixon--who
had basically come to terms with the New Deal and were internationalist but not confrontationalist when it came to the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, Eastern party powers did everything they could to deny the nomination to someone like Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican", who was
both isolationist and eager to roll back the Social Welfare State.

In this thin volume, Ms Schlafly argued that for Republicans to compete and win on the presidential level they would need to shuck off the
influence of the Easterners, the moneyed interests, and select truly conservative candidates who would draw sharp contrasts with the
Democrats, not try to fudge their differences. When she first wrote the book it was to justify a Goldwater candidacy, and she rewrote it
somewhat later in 1964 to prepare Republicans for the vicious assault that she correctly predicted that Madison Avenue would launch against
him, with establishment Republicans in the East joining with Democrats to defeat a man who threatened both big government and the rather
stable balance of terror that was the Cold War.

In his terrific book, Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein has told the fascinating story of how the grassroots conservative movement managed, in
1964, to finally win the nomination for one of their own. The victory was so unlikely that in places his book reads like a thriller. Of course,
with LBJ riding a tidal wave of popular support in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, one could argue that the win wasn't worth much.
In fact, Goldwater went down to such ignominious defeat that it left many on the Left saying that conservatism had ceased to exist in
America. Indeed, the Eastern Establishment had their way again in 1968 with the candidacy of Richard Nixon, who proceeded to expand
domestic government, bail out of Vietnam, buddy up to China, and pursue a policy of détente with the Soviet Union. But then came the
McGovern reforms, and the post-Watergate reforms, and American politics has been drifting Right ever since.

In 1976 Ronald Reagan nearly knocked off a sitting president in the first relatively open GOP primaries, and the Democrats nominated a
born-again Southerner, Jimmy Carter, who did beat Ford. Reagan came back and won in 1980, establishing what appeared to be a
Republican hammerlock on the presidency, but George Bush Sr. squandered that lock by raising taxes and alienating his conservative base.
This left him vulnerable to two other conservative Southerners, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, as, presumably for the first time in the history of
American politics, the Eastern establishment had no candidate at all to support, though they finally grudgingly went with Clinton as the least
conservative option. Just two years later, in 1994, Ms Schlafly's thesis was brilliantly vindicated as Republicans ran on the starkly
ideological platform of the Contract with America and won a resounding victory, taking both houses of Congress for the first time in
decades. Then in 2000, George W. Bush managed to defeat John McCain, the improbable darling of the establishment, in the primaries,
then proceeded to dethrone a sitting Vice President during an unprecedented economic boom. (It is notable that Al Gore too was a
conservative Southerner, despite his bizarre lurch leftward during the fall campaign.) Bush achieved these twin feats while running well to
the right of Ronald Reagan, who, though he undoubtedly would have liked to, never actually ran on a platform that called for privatizing
Social Security and turning over government services to "faith-based institutions".

Oddly enough, it is today Democrats who need their own Phyllis Schlafly (and isn't that a delicious prospect?) to come forward and summon
them back to their party principles. Unless Democrats are content to be a party that periodically gets to put their own "me-tooer" in the
White House, a Democratic president who will govern like a Republican, then they need to offer "a choice not an echo." It is Democrats
who need to shake themselves loose from the thrall of the big corporate interests who have taken over their party and transformed them into
what Clinton himself realized they had become : "Eisenhower Republicans...fighting the Reagan Republicans". They need to ask themselves
whether they exist solely to hold governmental power every once in a while, or whether they still have an organizing vision of the uses to
which that power should be put.

Congressional Republicans too should heed Ms Schlafly's sage advice and should borrow a page from their own playbook; in 2002 they
should run on a new Contract, one which differentiates them from Democrats in the most direct terms. Too many of our politicians have
been mesmerized by the siren call of the media for bipartisanship, but as Ms Schlafly wrote, citing an unnamed Republican leader :

Bipartisanship is just a $5 word for...a two-bit word, "me-tooism."

Our politics is at its best when the two parties stake out their very different, nearly opposite, positions on the issues and then seek to
convince us, by force of argument, that one side or the other has the better platform for America... The
centrality of ideas, and the imperative that parties be unwavering advocates of theirs, is the great insight that animates Phyllis Schlafly's still
timely polemic and that rescues it from some of its more paranoid and conspiracy-minded passages.

GRADE : C+

In the interest of full disclosure: I am a life-long Republican.

I read A Choice Not an Echo by Phylis Schafly during the 1964 presidential campaign. I was just out of high school and utterly non-political. Yet I can remember thinking what a bitter harridan she had to be.

I can only recall one line from her book. She commented that LBJ made a call on his car phone (which was a really big deal in those days!) "apparently without spilling his beer or slowing to the legal limit". I am quoting from memory, but that should be pretty close. I stopped reading at about that point.

Phylis Schafly is sort of an Ann Coulter without the wit, humor, accuracy, intelligence, and engaging personality. This book might be of value if you have a table with a short leg that needs shoring up. Otherwise I'd pass.

A bitter, biased, and ultimately unreadable book by a bitter, biased, and ultimately irrelevant old woman.