Second Wind

With the delivery of Harry Truman's State of the Union message, election-year politics took on a new urgency. Republican presidential candidates not only got their second wind; they chose the week as a good time to appear in a new light before the voters.

Tom Dewey, addressing the New York legislature at almost the same time that the President was addressing Congress, dropped his policy of not discussing national issues. He charged that the full blame for inflation lies with the Administration. He also dropped the pretense that he is not an avowed candidate. To a group of G.O.P. legislators, he confided that the same trio which ran his 1944 campaign (Herbert Brownell Jr., Russel Sprague and Ed Jaeckle) would also handle "whatever interests I have nationally" in 1948, i.e., they would be lining up delegates from now on.

Bob Taft, suppressing a recent tendency to fire shots from the hip which helped neither him nor his party, held his fire for 32 hours before making a we-can-do-it-better reply to the President.

Harold Stassen, who usually appears at dinners as a temperate man with a five-point plan, hit the headlines in the role of prosecutor against speculators (see Investigations).

Douglas Mac Arthur's supporters received a cable from him in Japan which they interpreted as meaning that the General was willing to be drafted. They announced that his name would be entered in both the Wisconsin primary on April 6 and the Illinois primary on April 13.

The biggest news came from New Hampshire. A group of leading Republicans held a draft-Eisenhower rally in Manchester, posed for pictures giving a clenched-fist cheer for Ike, and pledged themselves to enter a full slate of Eisenhower candidates (against Dewey and Stassen) in the state's March 9 preferential primary. The pledge had the blessing of New Hampshire's peppery Senator Charles W. Tobey. Ike's blessing was not legally required. The eight New Hampshire delegates would cut little ice at the Republican convention, but a smashing victory in this primary, the nation's first, would be a big boost to any man's chances for the nomination.

This week, the Draft-Eisenhower League announced that it would also enter Ike in the Pennsylvania primary on April 27. Pennsylvania's 73 convention votes would cut plenty of ice.

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