Off & Running

Like an early swallow ushering in a new season, the first Gallup poll of the 1956 presidential campaign last week fixed the starting positions as well as they will ever be fixed. After asking voters across the U.S. which ticket they would now like to see win, Pollster George Gallup announced these results:

Eisenhower-Nixon . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52%

Stevenson-Kefauver . . . . . . . . . . . 41%

Undecided . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7%

That placed Candidate Dwight Eisenhower farther ahead than he was at the start of the 1952 campaign, when the first post-convention sampling gave Eisenhower 50%, Stevenson 43%, and left 7% undecided. When the popular vote was counted in November, Eisenhower received 54.9%, Stevenson 44.4%. If the present undecided 7% were to split as the "decideds" did, Pollster Gallup pointed out, the candidates would stand today at 56% and 44%.

Reversed Roles. From that position, the campaign of 1956 will get under way this week in earnest. At Gettysburg, Pa., more than 400 Republican leaders will gather to hear President Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon launch the G.O.P campaign. At Harrisburg, a few miles to the north. Adlai Stevenson will put the Democratic campaign machinery in official motion with a 30-minute television and radio speech.

In 1956 both parties must reverse their long-established campaign roles. For the first time in 24 years, the in-power Republicans will concentrate on the positive process of placing their record before the voters. For the first time in 24 years, the Democrats must go over to the attack, must find or invent issues.

Disappointing Start. This reversal, plus the fact that Eisenhower Republicanism is already firmly established in the middle of the campaign road, has thrust upon Adlai Stevenson the unaccustomed role of aggressor. In his search for issues to attract the independent vote--which holds the important balance of power that it held in 1952--Stevenson in his pre-campaign campaigning has ranged far, wide, and sometimes erratically. In speeches that have become increasingly strident, he has come out on the one hand for sounder money and on the other hand for lower taxes and bigger federal expenditures. He has been at once for a stronger national defense establishment, an early end to the draft, and less reliance on strategic air power.

With the campaign's preliminary stages over, the first assessments of Early-Starter Stevenson's performance were on record last week. His campaigning, actually in progress since he announced last November that he would seek the nomination, might have given him a genuine advantage. But the Gallup poll did not show that it had done so, nor did the first cool analyses of what he had accomplished.

One of the sharpest of these came from the New York Times, which had been strong for Adlai Stevenson's nomination and had been genuinely friendly toward him. Said the even-tempered Times: "When a candidate for high office faces an uphill battle, as it is generally presumed Mr. Stevenson does in this year's election, there is an inevitable temptation for him to appeal to people weary of the necessary sacrifices . . . or to large groups of other people with some special interest. Mr. Stevenson seems to us to have done this [in his end-the-draft proposal, criticism of Ike's veto of the pork-barreling Rivers and Harbors bill, promise to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act] . . . We believe that at certain points the early days of his campaign have been disappointing to a considerable number of independent voters."

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