Talk

Comment on the Presidential campaign of 1928 has begun early, chiefly because of the possibility of a third term for President Coolidge. Last summer, every visitor at White Pine Camp was given a significance by the correspondents; in the autumn, much Coolidge and anti-Coolidge talk reverberated in state and congressional elections. Last week, Frank R. Kent, whose able pen pleases the Democratic readers of the Baltimore Sun, informed the sagaciously militant readers of the Nation that "the real business of this session of Congress is Presidential politics."

Then Mr. Kent plunged into the enigma of the man in the White House, said: "As to Mr. Coolidge wanting another term, that is too obvious to argue. No President ever liked the White House better than he. No President ever wanted to hold on to it more. When he leaves, it will be because he has to. If and when he announces that he will not be a candidate to succeed himself, it will be because his prospects have faded and he is afraid to take the chance. In the last six weeks he has made his desire to stay evident in a hundred ways, and nowhere more plainly than in his conferences with the correspondents. He wants it but he doesn't want to fight for it--and he won't. . . . In the whole of his political career there is no record of a fight." After listing the usual assets which President Coolidge might have in a third term campaign, Mr. Kent expanded on the negative arguments: "Should he get another [term], he will have been President two years longer than any other man in our history. The limitation that Washington and Jefferson regarded as wise and to which Grant and Roosevelt yielded as final is to be broken for Coolidge? It does not seem sane. Second, the agrarian revolt in the great Republican States in the West is real. . . . "A third argument is that there is in the field a Presidential candidate inherently stronger than Mr. Coolidge--Frank 0. Lowden. It may be that his age--66--or his health, or some other reason will keep Mr. Lowden from making an-other fight but there is not the least doubt that at this time ha is a candidate. In 1920 he missed the nomination by the narrowest margin. In 1924 he refused a unanimous nomination for Vice President on the Coolidge ticket. For eight years he has devoted himself to studying agricultural problems, to farming, to a quiet strengthening of his fences, to making friends. Today he has a stronger backing, more potential political power, and a better chance than any other man except Mr. Coolidge. He looms larger than any other. Popular, able, rich, with a fine record and an attractive personality, Lowden is the real candidate. The farmers are crazy about him. He is the agricultural hero.

"To sum up the other Coolidge liabilities, there is the inherent feebleness of the man himself, the admitted fact that he is largely a combination of machine support, party propaganda and accident. There is the further fact that Old Guard leaders cordially dislike him personally and resent the accident that projected him into the White House and enabled him to be nominated in 1924. But for the death of Mr. Harding no one would ever have seriously suggested Mr. Coolidge for the Presidency. The fact is he was so negligible a quantity that he might easily have failed for renomination as Vice President. He was in Washington in 1922 a political joke and would still be but for the glamor of the Presidency."