Democrats to Win?
By ROBERT WAITHMAN Washington.
NINE-TENTHS of the election talk in America at this moment is being devoted to the Republican Party; to the struggle between Mr. Eisenhower and Senator Taft for the Republican nomination. This gladiatorial contest will be decided in Chicago about a fortnight hence. It will then be time to recall that the Democratic Party is in the election too. Unless the Republican candidate, whoever he may be, goes on to win the election in November, and to become Presi- dent of the United States, the world (as Lincoln said in another context) will little note nor long remember the events that are of such breathless interest at the moment.
It has been recently pointed out in these columns that a victory for the Republican Party can be feasible only if a large segment of the American electorate—a larger segment than the Republicans can themselves alone provide, since they are now the minority party—has been convinced by November 4th that the country will benefit from a drastic change of government. Unless President Truman goes back on his declared intention not to run again (and there are not many people in Washington at this moment who believe that he will do-so), there will be a change of Administration anyway. But, if the Republicans are going to win, there will have to be a deep-seated conviction in millions of voters that twenty years of Democratic rule is long enough, and that overwhelming advantages are to be gained from a great national house- cleaning—which would not merely instal a new figure in the White House but would sweep some hundreds of high officials and some thousands of lesser officials out of their jobs and replace them with fresh talent. At first sight—and on first thoughts—there seems to be a lot in the idea of an out-and-out house-cleaning that could be expected to appeal to the alert, restless and boisterous Ameri- can mind; and, indeed, there have been a lot of Americans in the last few months who have held that this is the ,country's most profound need. Mr. Eisenhower or Senator Taft or some " compromise candidate," nominated because the two giants were hopelessly deadlocked (an unlikely prospect, as it now seems), will have to concentrate upon the encouragement and extension of such a frame of mind among the voters. But the Republican candidate cannot expect that the Democrats will allow him to proceed with this task without interruption.
In all Presidential election years since 1936 the Republicans have been up against the Democratic candidate, the Democratic Party machine and-- the eminent Cabinet Ministers and high office-holders on whom the party in power can call to .3upport their case. But in this Presidential election year the Republican Party will be up against an extra elemental force. They will be up against President Harry S. Truman, the old campaigner, the shrewdest and most effective vote-getter since Roosevelt. The word from the President is that, though he will not himself be running for office, he is preparing to employ every weapon in his considerable political arsenal on behalf of the chosen Democratic candidate. Some of the cognoscenti who have paid recent calls at the White House add a little rider to this pro- position. H. S. T. will conduct a personal all-out campaign, they say, so long as the Democratic Convention nominates the man he wants. .
To the question which man President- Truman wants as his potential Democratic successor there is no official answer yet. There probably will be, however, before the Democrats begin to ballot in the week beginning July 21st. In the meantime most of the cognoscenti in Washington are quite sure that they know which man the President doesn't want, and many claim to be reasonably sire that they- know which man the President does want. The man Mr. Truman doesn't want, they confidently say, is Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. In less interesting circumstances than those with which every- one now has to deal it would be quite enough to know that Truman doesn't want Kefauver: it would be enough to cause Kefauver to be carried gently off the stage and dumped in the wings. The element of conflict arises froth the fact that Kefauver has worked with such a will in the state primaries, and has shown himself' to be so popular with the voting Democrat-in-the-street, that he now has by far the largest number of pledged delegates behind him, and could conceiv- ably walk off with the nomination in defiance-of Mr. Truman. The cognoscenti are inclined to predict, nevertheless, that he will not be allowed to do so. As someone said, the Kefauver train is way ahead of -all other trains, but it appears to be on the wrong track. What President Truman and the Democratic Party chieftains are understood to feel about Kefauver is that he is a lightweight and an amateur; that he owes his popularity with the public to the flash-in-the-pan televised hearings of the Senate Crime Investigating Committee, which he headed; and that more loyalty to the Democratic machine—and a less cocky attitude—than he has shown will be required of the Democratic candidate. It thus gives the Party professionals no pleasure whatever to observe the lead he has obtained in the public popularity contest.
The man Mr. Truman is understood to want is Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois; but we are here on rather less positive ground. Certainly the President did want Stevenson.
But he turned the President down, saying that he was intent only on re-election as Governor. This is still his official atti- tude. One school of thought is that the President was con- siderably nettled by the rebuff Governor Stevenson adminis- tered, and may not forgive him. Another school holds that, -since Stevenson is the established vote-getter most dedicated to the liberal principles of Mr. Truman, it will come about that the President will lend his great weight to a movement to " draft " him for the nomination, and that in such circum- stances Stevenson will yield.
It was being reported last week-end that the Governor had privately already decided to make himself available for the Democratic nomination, having now solved " personal prob- lems " that had hitherto inhibited him. There is little diffidence in America about public discussion of some of the personal problems of a potential Presidential candidate, and the Gallup Poll did not hesitate to report the other week that the well- known fact that Governor Stevenson and his wife were divorced had led it to enquire whether the voters had any fundamental objection to the election of a divorced man. Eighty-one per cent. said it would make no difference to them. This indicated that fewer voters were opposed to a divorced man than to a military man for President—an earlier poll havint.shown that 70 per cent. felt that it would make no difference if a soldier were candidate.
Those who are not sure that Mr. Truman will take Governor Stevenson as the man he wants have lately been suggesting, rather shyly, that it is just possible that the light- ning may yet strike .Mr. Averell Harriman. The handsome, serious, rich, diligent and loyal Harriman, a late starter in the Democratic race, has embraced Mr. Truman's Fair Deal pro- gramme root and branch. He has just defeated Senator Kefauver, moreover, in the small but not insignificant primary in Washington. And he- is ,working hard. But his achieve- ments have been in diplomacy and not in politicS-, and the questions whether a wealthy diplomat with a Wall Street back- ground can be accepted by the Party professionals or elected by the people remain unanswered.
It may make a lot of difference", of course, whom the Demo- crats nominate. But if it can be 'assumed that they will pick a good candidate—one who has or can develop a considerable personal appeal—anybody who looks beyond the present pre- occupations might well conclude that the man the well- advertised Republicans nominate a fortnight from now is a long, long way from any certainty of victory. America is prosperous, and business looks like remaining good; and how will the argument that it's time for a change stack up against this consideration, when the people come to think about it ? The Democrats might run into a nasty accident, which could take any form from a Chinese offensive in Korea to the dis-
covery late in the campaign of some parallel to the Zinovieff letter (for, if the electorate were ever really convinced that the Truman Administration in any of its parts had been infiltrated or even badly bamboozled by the Communists, the election could be very thoroughly lost by the Democrats). But, accidents apart, the undeniable fact that most people in America are better off now than they ever were before is a high hurdle for the • Republicans to jump.
Beyond that is another one, which may be even higher. In 1948 Mr. Truman and the Democrats won the election in spite of the loss of 1,169,000 votes in consequence of the States' Rights rebellion in the South, and in spite of the draining away of 1,157,000 more votes by Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party. Unless things are mismanaged there will be no Southern rebellion this year, and the Progressive Party is in no position now to menace anyone. And there is Mr. Truman, all ready to storm up and down the country on whistle-stop tours, with television and radio at his elbow—with the means, perhaps, of doing more for the Democratic candidate than the Demo- cratic candidate can do for himself.
Nothing about a Presidential election in America is certain in advance, for the mighty may be brought low and the humble may be exalted. But, as things stand now, it would seem to be a sad mistake to sell the Democratic Party short.
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