Just Politics

Despite the foul-ups in his own party, Harry Truman had time to pay his respects to the Republicans. The occasion, in his busy week, was another "open house'' for Democratic congressional candidates, who arrived in Washington clucking nervously about the Wallace fiasco. Mr. Truman met them in his office.

It is "absolutely essential," he told them, that the U.S. elect a Congress which is in sympathy with the 1944 Democratic platform. Said he: "I don't see how any voter who thinks at all could vote for the Reece-Taft-Crawford* program. The difficulties with which we are now faced are due in part to the obstructionist tactics of those gentlemen. . . .

"Right now we are in just as great an emergency--and have been ever since V-J day--as we were when Pearl Harbor happened; and that emergency will continue until we can get peace and production."

Two Answers. When Woodrow Wilson had thus frankly asked for a Democratic Congress in 1918 it was bad politics--as Wilson found out to his sorrow. Political observers today thought Harry Truman was in such bad political shape that his appeal would make little difference. At any rate, he got a quick, political answer from Carroll Reece: "I am inclined to agree with Mr. Truman's statement . . . at least to the extent that the country does face a grave emergency, which emergency is the Truman Administration."

He already had a slightly different kind of answer from presidential aspirant Harold Stassen who, a fortnight ago, called for the election of a Republican Congress. Harold Stassen's reason: a Republican Congress would give the voters the chance to judge whether they wanted a completely Republican Government in 1948.

But neither Mr. Truman nor any other regular Democrat was anxious to give U.S. voters this judicial opportunity. Mr. Truman would be politicking for his life from now on. So would colleagues like Senator Alben Barkley, who was in a Cincinnati hotel room last week (see cut), getting ready to cross the river and beat his native Kentucky bushes for his fellow Democrat, Kentucky senatorial candidate John Y. Brown (see Political Notes). Far & wide, Democrats and Republicans were at the work they know best: politics.

* B. Carroll Reece, G.O.P. national chairman; Senator Robert Taft and Congressman Fred Crawford, who fought the Administration's price control extension bill.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.