I caught up with Goldwater, who lives in the Phoenix area, this week to see how Barry Goldwater's granddaughter ended up at a Democratic convention. CC isn't actually a Democrat -- she's still registered as an independent, though she thinks she might switch over soon -- and she wasn't a convention delegate, just a guest of the Arizona delegation. Nor was it her first public foray into Democratic politics: In 2008, she came out in favor of Obama and against the Republican nominee from her home state, John McCain.

This might seem like a repudiation of the legacy of the man many credit with pioneering the Republican Party's shift toward an ever more uncompromising conservatism. But CC Goldwater -- a filmmaker who in 2006 completed an HBO documentary about her grandfather called Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater -- sees it as consistent. Goldwater, 52, lived with her grandparents for part of her childhood in order to attend high school in Phoenix (she grew up in the small town of Sedona), but her sense of her grandfather was mainly nonpolitical. "Sometimes I'd see the Secret Service at my window because Kissinger was coming over for coffee or something," she laughed. "I knew he was really important, but not what he stood for."

It was through the documentary that she got to know, and admire, her grandfather's politics, interviewing dozens of political figures on all sides about Barry Goldwater's beliefs and his legacy. It's this education that she believes qualifies her to say what he would think of today's GOP. "At the end of his career, he was seeing it too," she said. "He was saying things like, 'If I had to run 10 or 20 years from now, I might not get elected in my own party.' The Republican Party has changed into less than what I think Barry Goldwater would be supportive of."

CC's critique of the GOP, one her grandfather began to articulate late in his life as well, is a libertarian one. "He was very vocal about his fear of people like the late Jerry Falwell and the religious right taking over the party," she said. "He was concerned about the change in civil liberties and women's rights." In fact, Barry Goldwater spent much of his political retirement as a thorn in the side of the mainstream GOP. He said the party had been taken over by "kooks" and "extremists"; he called for gays to be allowed to serve in the military, saying, "You don't need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight"; he even endorsed a Democrat in an Arizona congressional race.

A few weeks ago, CC and her mother Joanne Goldwater, Barry Goldwater's eldest child, endorsed Richard Carmona, the Democratic candidate for Barry Goldwater's onetime U.S. Senate seat, saying he best represented Barry Goldwater's integrity and support for abortion rights. It's safe to say Democrats haven't rushed to embrace Barry Goldwater in return, however. His name is most commonly used to invoke a conservatism so right-wing voters won't support it, as when Obama adviser David Plouffe told the New York Times that Romney was "the most conservative nominee that they've had going back to Goldwater, and that "one of the key issues in the campaign is to make sure people know that."