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Show 1948 Long Way Off, but Taf t Looms as GOP Hope By BAUKHAGE Neivs Analyst and Commentator. WNU Service, 1616 Eye Street, N.W., Washington, D. C. Along about June of any election year, when a lot of simple souls are thinking about moonlight and d& " j roses, electric f S fans, and where r ' to go for a sum- 5 j mer vacation, a ' Jot of longer- i & range planners , 1 are wondering : i A M about next win- -w" 4 if j ter's coal supply, ' ?: . J $ harvest time, and i;J manyother , j things a lot fur- " ther away than the fly on your 'tewAa nose. Among these are the politicians. poli-ticians. It's a great time to lean back in a chair in the Senate office building or thereabouts, open another bottle of White Rock, light another see-gar, see-gar, and burble on about what's going go-ing to happen come November, and, still more intriguing, to prognosticate prognosti-cate on presidential possibilities. It's fun for the newcomers because be-cause it's so easy for them to predict, pre-dict, in the light of what's happening happen-ing right now, just what will happen then. It's still more fun for the old timers because they know that the voters who may not love you in the autumn often seem very palsy in the spring and vice versa. Since there isn't much use in speculating spec-ulating on who the Democratic presidential pres-idential nominee will be, it's more interesting to talk about Republican possibilities. Perhaps that is why, along abcut the middle of May, the heavy backers back-ers of Bob Taft began to be heard from. Up until then, most of the talk in the couloirs was how Bricker was the No. 1 boy, and how Stassen mustn't even be mentioned above a whisper. Even Stassen's own men decided it was better for the young man from Minnesota to keep his head down so he wouldn't attract any lightning until he had found out whether his forums were more potent po-tent than the against-em's. Now It's getting to be more serious fun to talk about Tat't. Taft wants to be President. lie has wanted to be President before. be-fore. He is pretty much master mas-ter of the Republican organization, organiza-tion, but even if he weren't, Bricker, his present friend and rival, is more "beatable," despite de-spite the good impression he made on his speaking tour before be-fore the last convention . . . what with the leftist look in so many veterans' eyes. Bricker has a staunch and solid conservative following. But it is a little too solidly conservative. Taft cbuld hardly be called a radical. In fact, his political garden has never produced even a pale and lonely pink. On the other hand, his supporters sup-porters prudently can point to many a constructively liberal measure which has had his blessing. Only the other day, I was talking with an ardent administration official of-ficial who has been battling for a measure badly battered by conservatives conserv-atives of both political stripes. I asked him if he could expect to retrieve re-trieve in the senate a certain provision pro-vision in his legislation, lost in the house. "Oh, yes," he answered, "Bob Taft will go along on that." And Taft has a good liberal record rec-ord on such mass-appeal measures as housing. The Republicans don't have to deal with the old-line bosses to the extent that the Democrats Demo-crats do and in two of the larger cities where the Republican machine is vital Philadelphia and Cincinnati everything would be jake so far as Taft is concerned. He, himself, is kingpin in his home state organization organ-ization . . . and Mr. Pew, who makes the Republican wheels go round in Pennsylvania, want ed Taft in '40 and '41. It is to be presumed he'll feel the same in '48. This doesn't eliminate other brilliant bril-liant possibilities, including Messrs. Stassen and Vandenberg, both of whose political futures may be molded by international developments. develop-ments. Mr. Vandenberg has done a lot of the molding himself. This could work both ways. On the one hand the energy and devotion with which Mi. Vandenberg has applied himself him-self to foreign affairs, and the powerful pow-erful influence he has exerted, have greatly increased his silhouette on the international horizon. On the J other hand, these activities, both in quantity and quality, have taken him far afield from the usual polit- i ical approach to a Republican presi- dential nomination. It may be there is a niche in the 1 making that would need a man of his proportion to fill but one Democrat Demo-crat said to me the other day: "Sometimes it looks as if Van would rather be right than President." Times change, almost kaleidoscop-ically, kaleidoscop-ically, these days. The presidential candidate of tomorrow may turn out to be (if you'll excuse my Irish) a dark horse of an entirely different color. Columnists Speak Out of (in?) Turn The carping critics of today and yesterday enjoy decrying the various vari-ous inroads upon our founding fathers' fa-thers' ideas of government by the people. We hear much about "government "govern-ment by lobbies"; "government by executive order"; "government by this and by that . . ." President Roosevelt used to inveigh in-veigh against what might have been called an attempt at "government by columnists." It always seemed rather unnecessary on his part since he used to be elected regularly regu-larly with a press 80 per cent hostile. hos-tile. Recently President Truman was called open to comment on the work of the distinguished columnist, Walter Lippmann. Lippmann expounded the somewhat some-what startling theme with even more startling trimmings that Britain and Russia were pursuing pursu-ing a foreign policy based on the possibility, if not the probability prob-ability of war, with each side hoping to enlist eventual German Ger-man support. In fact, Mr. Lippmann even discovered discov-ered an invisible German army in j the British zone. (I don't mean that literally, for I understand that he did not visit the British zone in hi3 tour of investigation.) The President's comment was that hindsight was better than fore- sight, but as far as a hidden army was concerned, he never heard of it . . . and didn't think it existed. The same day, Mr. Truman was asked to comment on the statement of another distinguished correspondent, correspond-ent, Harold Callender, Paris correspondent cor-respondent for the New York Times. Mr. Callender had reported a sharp reversal of American foreign policy pol-icy toward Russia. The President slapped that down, too, saying that he knew of no change . . . and he made the policy. Some days before, Sumner Welles, former undersecretary of state, now a radio commentator, made observations ob-servations similar to those of Callender. Cal-lender. Recently Harold Ickes, another former civil servant turned columnist, colum-nist, declared that the careful newspaper news-paper reader could get more authoritative author-itative Information than the secretary secre-tary of state possessed, because the secretary's in formation was screened by a reactionary and inefficient in-efficient aide. Just how much influence the individual in-dividual writer or commentator wields is a question. In most cases, it takes an almost unanimous repetition repe-tition of an idea to produce action. And then its effect on the government govern-ment is usually indirect. It results from the pressure of public opinion, which in many cases is created by press and radio, when the many men of many minds and political faiths can agree on some one subject. When the majority agree it usually means that they are as nearly right as mortals can be in these confusing confus-ing days. In the case of Walter Lippmann, Lipp-mann, I believe that he is voicing voic-ing what many of us who have followed recently international gatherings and who have been in Europe since the war, agree upon: namely, that the statesmen states-men of the major European powers have fallen into the old pattern . , . basing their diplomacy diplo-macy an the thesis that war ip more or less inevitable, instead of the new pattern where the objective is to prevent war rather rath-er than prepare for it. Another theme of Lippmann's which is not held by him nlnne, to which this writer certainly agrees, is that the problem of the proper handling of Germany is the most important foreign problem, and the one upon which all the other problems prob-lems depend. Iy ARBS ... by B aukha ge The average age of the American t- population has been increasing since colonial times, says the Met-ropolit Met-ropolit an Information service. Just what fs your average age, today? Army regulations have made men hat-conscious, says Business Week magazine. The prices they have to pay foi the civilian variety will i rna'"e some of litem unconscious. The coal strike was like a steady stream of sand filtering into the complicated machinery of our economy econ-omy . . . grinding down the gears, burning out the hearings, changing the chorus of conversion to a cacophony ca-cophony of shrieking brakes. Food -greedy Americans should remember that breadlines are worse than nylines. |