Goldwater Rights

I’m quoted in a short dispatch that appears on VanityFair.com’s website, and it seems I’ve been misquoted to hilarious effect:

Should the G.O.P. start listening to Ron Paul? Reihan Salam, an associate editor at The Atlantic, and co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, believes the coalition Paul put together may be too flaky and heterogeneous—and, frankly, not Republican enough—to ever be taken seriously by the party. “A lot of that movement has to do with Goldwater rights, libertarian conservatism, a lot of it is Rainbow Coalition, and maybe half of it comes from the far left,” says Salam. “It was a very unusual, quirky collection of lots of people who kind of reject the mainstream of American politics. I think the relationship to the mainstream of Republican politics is not really there.”

Goldwater rights? Rainbow Coalition? I think I was referring to the Goldwater Right and to a “rainbow coalition,” and I’m pretty sure that there were many clauses separating the strangely clipped clauses that appear in the piece. But I can hardly blame the guy — I was on an iPhone, which is only slightly better than using two tin cans attached by a string.