Writing in the Huffington Post to clarify rumors that his family would be supporting Obama in the 2008 election, Barry Goldwater, Jr. explains that that just ain’t so:

Barry Goldwater was one of the icons of the Republican Party and, yes, would be unhappy with many of the recent failures from within. I speak about this all the time and how mad I am that Republicans have lost their way. However, we do not find our way back by sheepishly going over to the other side. My father worked to rebuild the party in 1964 by taking it back from the liberal Establishment. He would work to do the same thing today.

Culture11’s Ericka Andersen interprets this as an attempt to bestow the senior Goldwater’s postmortem endorsement on John McCain, though in point of fact the great man’s son never says any such thing, and indeed insists that “[w]hen I speak, I represent my own thinking and never imply I speak for anyone else”. And so while Goldwater, Jr. does come right out and say that he’s voting for the Arizona senator, he says only this to clue us in to the likely position of his father:

My father would never endorse a candidate or a party that wanted to grow government, raise taxes or in any way step on our freedoms.

Sounds like a third-party voter if ever there was one.