Low Grade Organism

Like the heirs of a bankrupt corporation, Democratic politicos ploughed through the books last week, trying to find out what had gone wrong. They had expected a slump. But few of them had anticipated the size of the crash. Its causes were still as tangled as discarded ticker tape.

From the snarl they could sort out some obvious facts: the failure of the P.A.C. and big-city machines; labor's refusal to buy the exclusively Democratic brand of politics, the anger of meatless housewives. To some extent, at least, Republicans had been able to make parts of the Democratic line suspect by slapping on the Red label.

But there were deeper, more fatal defects. The Democrats' own board of directors was sadly divided. One split was the final revolt of the Southern conservatives against the New Dealers. Another came with the huffy retirement of such top-rank officers as Harold Ickes and Henry Wallace from the Cabinet.

The Wallace departure in itself was enough to send Democratic stocks skidding. By his ill-timed, ill-considered outburst on U.S. foreign policy, he had immeasurably widened the existing breach. His stubborn insistence on campaigning only made it worse. In California, Candidate Will Rogers was forced to disown him completely. In New York he did the cause of Candidate Jim Mead no good by bearishly predicting Mead's defeat.

Badgered by these problems, the Democrats had nearly let one gilt-edged security slip through their fingers. Instead of advertising their universally accepted, bipartisan foreign policy as a Democratic invention, they let the Republicans peddle it as their own stock issue.

All this was enough to send the Democrats into the campaign with a defeatist psychology which cost them still more votes. While Republicans plugged away with positive promises (such as the 20% tax reduction), Democrats stayed on the defensive. In close contests, poor Democratic morale was enough to swing the election to fighting GOPsters.

Pick 'em Up. If that was the answer to their blowup, the question for earnest Democratic politicians was what to do next. First of all, they needed someone to start picking up the pieces. National Chairman Bob Hannegan had fled, exhausted, to rest. Presumably he would resign when he came back. Aspiring successors were around, but none of them amounted to much. The chief applicant was fat, genial Robert Kerr, who would be out of his job as Governor of Oklahoma in January.

But the main search was for a receiver who would accept the responsibility for a moribund concern. Barring calamities at home & abroad, the Republicans were a cinch to win in 1948. Using this year's congressional elections as a base, Pollster George Gallup computed a G.O.P. victory by 317 electoral votes.

But the Democrats could take some comfort from Columnist Walter Lippman, who had written, after the Republican debacle in 1932: "It is always a mistake to assume that either of the two American parties is dead, however divided and crushed it may seem to be. Herbert Croly (founder of the New Republic) used to say that the two parties were virtually indestructible because they were low-grade organisms, which had neither a brain nor a heart that could be stopped, and so you could cut them in half and the two halves would wiggle on and somehow grow together again."

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