The Crucial 4%

The issue was as clear cut as any Republican could wish. It was the Fair Deal and its welfare state. The Republicans' John Foster Dulles did not say "yes, but--" or hint he could do it better; he declared bluntly that the Fair Deal was "statism," and he was against it. The Democrats' Herbert Lehman accepted the challenge headon: "If I go to Washington, I will work for a welfare state."

Last week the voters of the State of New York brought in their verdict. It was for the welfare state. In the first major election since Harry Truman's 1948 "mandate," they elected Lehman to the Senate by a majority of 196,000.

Both sides had accepted the campaign as a national battleground. President Truman had proclaimed Lehman his man. Democratic big guns, ranging from Vice President Alben Barkley to Representative Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., raked the state with oratory. Labor worked as never before. New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey, still smarting under criticism of his ''me, too" campaign in 1948, stumped the state almost as widely as his candidate. He called for a "holy crusade" to elect Dulles, lent Dulles a campaign staff.

The margin of victory was roughly 4% of the vote--but it was enough. In nonpresidential years, the state had been Republican in every election since 1938. Herbert Lehman was one of the best vote getters the Democrats ever had, but Senator Irving Ives had defeated him in 1946 by a solid 251,000 votes.

The city voters beat Dulles. In New York City, conservative Deweyman Dulles dropped 210,000 votes that liberal Deweyman Ives had had in 1946. Upstate, Dulles, in his first try for public office, held the usual Republican rural counties, but hustling labor workers got out an extra 195,000 Lehman votes in upstate cities.

Dulles sent a terse, good-natured telegram to President Harry Truman: "You win." The President didn't reply. At his weekly press conference he plainly implied that he probably would find little further use for Dulles as a bipartisan spokesman at the world's diplomatic councils. If so, the loss would be the nation's as well as Dulles', for though an amateur in politics, he had been a professional in diplomacy since 1907.

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