Happy Traveler

Slumping softly onto the runway of Portland, Ore.'s International Airport one afternoon last week, the arriving Columbine III coincided with a meteorological shift to fair weather. A hard rain stopped, blue sky reappeared, and the sun peeked out over Portland. For hard-running Oregon Republicans, like their brothers in Minnesota, Washington. California and Colorado, the pulse-quickening presence of Dwight Eisenhower made the political sun shine-a little brighter, too.

Heartening G.O.P. cohorts in the West was precisely one of the reasons that had brought the President winging out from Washington on a five-day hedgehop that carried the Columbine into five states and logged for Ike another 5,850 campaign miles. In Minnesota, where 500,000 jammed his path during a 33-mile tour of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the President extended coattails to Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Ancher Nelsen. Droning westward to the coast, he boosted Washington's Art Langlie and Oregon's Doug McKay, both hand-picked to run for the Senate, both lagging before Ike appeared on the horizon. In California the Eisenhower grin gleamed on Senator Tom Kuchel, and in Denver, during a 55-minute layover, the President stumped for Senate Candidate Dan Thornton.

November Choice. But Ike had come West also to speak-not in anger at a flailing opposition, but in anxiety lest the voters mistake the issues that were being raised. The Democrats seemed determined to make the draft and the H-bomb the issues on which they would win or lose. In that case, the U.S. had to understand its choice. In Portland's aging civic auditorium, he spelled it out: "Hard sense and experience versus pie-in-the-sky promises and wishful thinking."

As he hurried from state to embattled state, Ike presented other thoughts to ponder. Among them:

AGRICULTURE: "Some political orators-no doubt overly excited by the din of a campaign-actually have been saying that I am 'against' the little farmer-that I consider the farmer expendable-that I think the family farm is obsolete. What kind of drivel is this?"

INCOME: "They [the Democrats] express every American's concern for the plight of our low-income families. But they are careful not to mention that today's prosperity has reduced the number of such families to an alltime low."

FISCAL POLICY: "They promise lower federal taxes for every citizen, greater federal spending on virtually every front, and a beautifully balanced federal budget. I have called this phenomenon what it is: the biggest and most flamboyant three-for-one sale in recent American politics."

Happier Today. Only once in his tour did Ike find himself facing an unenthusiastic crowd. In the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank, the Columbine landed at the airport adjoining the Lockheed plant where the Presidential Super Constellation had been built. Ike found the crowd of 25,000 sullenly impassive to his greeting. Lockheed's management had stopped work for the President's visit; the International Association of Machinists, representing the workers, had objected to the order as "pure politics," called it "a flat donation in excess of $25,000" to the Republican Party. But elsewhere, the waving, shouting, confetti-tossing* multitudes acted like a tonic.

Pausing in Denver for his brief talk to 5.000 ranged at the airport to meet him, the President reported "one thing on this trip has impressed me mightily. I am convinced America ... is happier today than it was four years ago." So too last week was Candidate Dwight Eisenhower.

*In Portland two fragments of confetti lodged in Ike's left eye, left it sore and bloodshot for a day.

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