Not "No, No, No"

The Republican Party's strategy committee huddled in Chicago last week to devise a strategy for the 1950 congressional campaign, and perhaps even the presidential race of 1952. The strategy: 1) immobilize the party's moderates and liberals, 2) uncompromising opposition to everything the Democrats stand for.

"You need money, money and more money to get the organization rolling again," explained Illinois' Fred Virkus, a megaphone for the Colonel Bertie McCormick wing of the G.O.P. "But you are not going to get the money until you can answer the question, 'What does the Republican Party stand for?' in a way that everybody can understand."

The strategy committee's acting chairman, Michigan Auto Dealer Arthur E. Summerfield, who tried to win the 1948 presidential nomination for Senator Vandenberg, said that he personally was clear on what the party's position should be: "I think everyone here will agree with me that the difference between the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations is that with Roosevelt we were drifting toward socialism, but with Truman there is no drift--it's a headlong rush . . ." Said Summerfield: "We must be brutally frank." The G.O.P. should "divest itself of 'me-too-ism' and go to the people with a program clearly defined and unmistakably in opposition to that now offered by our opponents."

National Chairman Guy Gabrielson and the rest of the strategy committee endorsed the chairman's words. But two facts stood in the way of translating the words into an undeviating policy. Republican policy in 1950 will be made by the party's congressional leaders who did not attend the Chicago meeting. And few politicians believe that Republicans can recapture the decisive votes of the nation's political independents with a program of indiscriminate opposition.

That was the lesson which Republican Governor Alfred Driscoll of New Jersey read to his party colleagues last month when he won one of the few Republican victories in 1949 (TIME, Nov. 21). The lesson was read again last week by New York's independent-minded Senator Irving Ives.

Like Governor Driscoll, Ives knows that there is a large difference between presenting constructive alternatives and disagreeing just for the sake of disagreement. "We can't just say, 'no, no, no,'" he said. "We've got to have answers to some of the gigantic problems ... we are facing."

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