| OCR Text |
Show Behind,, By PaulMallon Js Released by Western Newspaper Union. PEOPLE 'CHANGING OVER FROM ADMINISTRATION WASHINGTON. I asked a Kentucky Ken-tucky friend of mine who is the best possible authority on the people il not the politics of the state, for an explanation of the astonishing success suc-cess of a Republican gubernatorial candidate in that utmost stronghold of the administration since the beginning be-ginning of the New Deal, the state which has two Democratic senators, one the administration leader in the senate. He replied: "The people are changing over. Jim Farley had it about right in his comment on the defeat of his Democratic Demo-cratic candidate in New York when he said the people were tired and dissatisfied with what they have teen getting." The country, too, is changing over. The local resnlts everywhere cannot be satisfactorily explained in any other way. The successful Kentucky Republican, Republi-can, Simeon S. Willis, is what is known in politics as "a good man." He is the elderly Kentucky gentleman gentle-man type, a former judge, honest, friendly. In the past, the far distant past, when the Republicans wanted to win that border state, they had to put in plenty of money. Willis had no money, at least not of that size. The big money people did not shell out for him, probably were not asked to. ADMINISTRATION WORRIED The administration rushed every one of its national powers from Kentucky into the threatened final breach. Senate Leader Barkley and the recently cantankerous Happy Chandler, spent the last three weeks before election on the formerly dark and bloody ground. Some Kentuck-ians Kentuck-ians think this was a mistake, too. Mr. Roosevelt once spoke in Kentucky Ken-tucky against Chandler in the early New Dealing days when Happy was trying to crash the gate of big league politics and establish the gubernatorial gu-bernatorial machine he has enjoyed up until last Tuesday. The Democratic Demo-cratic candidate was a Chandler man, J. Lyter Donaldson. Chandler is one of the senators who returned from a world tour recently, re-cently, with advice for changes in administration world policy which were sharply and publicly rejected by the White House. When he and Barkley rushed back to Kentucky to get into bed together with Donaldson and call for upholding uphold-ing the President, apparently they did not appear to a majority of the voters to be very harmonious bedfellows, bed-fellows, but rather just tentatively congenial. Donaldson has been described de-scribed as an ordinary gubernatorial candidate. In view of this background, the explanation of Democratic National Chairman Frank Walker, that the scattered elections' results did not involve national issues and had no national significance, was somewhat lacking, if not sad. The Republicans have won before, recently in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, but not by these latest lat-est majorities. The results indisputably indis-putably signify that the Republican trend, started in the losing Willkie race and two years later turned into nearly a Republican capture of the house, has now expanded even wider, wid-er, continuing in the same direction. What was discernible elsewhere can now be said to be true even of Kentucky. The farm vote seems gone, labor split, and radicals (New York city, Detroit) have lost their vote-pulling power. That leaves little lit-tle to work on. Whether the President's personality person-ality and unrivaled ingenuity can change this, I do not know. I always al-ways thought war victory would restore re-store whatever prestige Mr. Roosevelt Roose-velt lost, but this now has gone pretty pret-ty far. NO FOURTH TERM? I would say the scattered local election results have an unexpected unexpect-ed and the deepest possible significance. signif-icance. They suggest to my mind for the first time that Mr. Roosevelt may not run for a fourth term. There is no better politician than Mr. Roosevelt. The reason he ran for the third term was because he thought he could win without as much opposition as he got. I doubt that he would choose to blotch his record or make a useless martyr of himself in a losing chance, but might prefer, perhaps, to head "an international organization" described de-scribed in the Moscow agreements as a hope and expectation of the Big Four nations. That seems to be the real possi bility now. S WHAT STALIN MEANT Stalin's victory speech gave people peo-ple here a better understanding of the Hull - Stalin - Eden declarations than the generalized text of those documents. He implemented them, clearly, calmly, confidently. The impending victory, he said, had freed Russia, and he forecast freedom for conquered and occupied nations of Europe under governments govern-ments to be chosen by their own people, which would be his conception concep-tion of democracy. |
