You Can't Win

During a routinely optimistic election forecast last week, Republican Chairman Guy Gabrielson observed that in Nevada the party had high hopes of dethroning lordly, white-haired old (74) Senator Pat McCarran. A reporter asked why, and Gabrielson explained: "It's his New Deal voting record."

The reporters laughed, and Gabrielson, after thinking over his words, joined in. For Democrat McCarran, during his 18 years in the Senate, had been about as fond of New and Fair Deal medicines as Carrie Nation was of bourbon. Before the 1938 primaries, when F.D.R. himself went inland to have his say on candidates, he visited Nevada, but haughtily ignored McCarran's candidacy for renomination; McCarran had angrily fought too many New Deal measures. Shaggy Pat won anyway, went back to the Senate to cry out against aid to embattled France and Britain ("One American boy, the son of an American mother, is worth more than all Central Europe"). The world had changed a lot since then, but not Pat McCarran. Even to this day, the only European he seems to admire is Spain's Dictator Franco. Though liberals get choleric at the mention of the man from Nevada, at his unsuccessful campaign to cut down admittance of D.P.'s, at his troublemaking immigration clauses in the antisubversive law, Pat goes his own way. Where a New York Senator speaks for 14,741,445 people, Pat speaks for only 158,283--the smallest state population in the nation. He also speaks to many of them, and tends to their wants.

At first he did not even bother to go back home and campaign; he won the Democratic renomination without trying. He is considered an odds-on favorite to defeat earnest Republican George Marshall, an ex-district judge, despite what Guy Gabrielson said. As Pat drove or flew from one Nevada town to another, it was easy to see why. He knew, and had gotten jobs, furloughs or information for, hundreds of the people he shook hands with. "How," asked one Nevada editor, "can you beat a man like that?"

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