The Oracles

Across the U.S., editorialists and columnists took a firm grip on their pencils last week and settled down to intensive punditing on the presidential campaign.

One loud note in the editorial chorus was a warning against apathy. "The Republican mood," wrote Columnist Marquis Childs. "is one of supreme conviction of victory, with overtones of the smugness against which President Eisenhower himself warned." Citing the poor TV ratings of both political conventions, the Providence Bulletin thought that apathy was a problem confronting the Democrats as well. "The election will be no shoo-in for the Republicans," editorialized New York's Daily News, advising against a "refined, polite, high-level campaign . . . Nice-Nellyism seldom wins elections in this country." Slapping Adlai Stevenson for his "prissy little jab at President Eisenhower's favorite game, golf," the News totted up 3,500,000 U.S. golfers and concluded: "In sneering at golf, a politician takes much the same risk as in sneering at Baseball, Baby, Mother, The Flag. The Home or The Dog."

Legworlc. Columnist David Lawrence, a staunch Eisenhower man, thought that, despite the forthcoming campaign hullabaloo, "a preponderant number of citizens have already made up their minds how they are going to vote." But the Chicago Tribune's Walter Trohan contended that the last two weeks of the old 1948 campaign saw "certain" Republican victory "transformed to crushing defeat." and noted that the Democrats have "a hard hitting team" this time. The New York Herald Tribune's Roscoe Drummond thought that Stevenson and Estes Kefauver were off to a fast start, with a big improvement in the Democratic nominee's campaign technique, organization and party morale. "Mr. Stevenson," he said, "is a more forceful, more informal, more effective campaigner than before. Mr. Kefauver is a formidable ally."

Columnist Joseph Alsop alternated deep thinking with strenuous legwork. went doorbell ringing in Portland and Seattle to talk with the voters. His findings: 1) the big issue with most people is foreign policy, i.e., peace; 2) voters have made a switch from Ike to Stevenson that may put Oregon and Washington into the Democratic column. But Alsop cautioned: "In most cases, the switchers had made their decisions without passion or violent conviction. Their decisions, one felt, might be changed later on."

Taking a view held by most columnists, Walter Lippmann decided that "the central contest is for the vote of the Democrats and of the independents with Democratic leanings who in 1952 voted for Eisenhower, but did not vote for other Republican candidates." Wrote Lippmann: "Governor Stevenson is trying to win back

Democrats. To do this, he must show them that if they come home, they will find not only the old Democratic party but that party purged of what drove them away from it in 1952, and standing for what they wanted from Eisenhower--namely peace abroad and at home."

The question of how the South will go found most observers in agreement. To hear such papers as the Atlanta Constitution and the Nashville Tennessean tell it, the region will again become the pre-1948 Democratic Solid South. As to the organized-labor vote, the Washington Evening Star, the Minneapolis Star and the Philadelphia Inquirer held that it could not be "delivered" by labor leaders. The Chicago Tribune asked skeptically: "Is there a labor vote?"

The Betting Odds. Some editorials struck a nonpartisan note. The Chicago Daily News looked over the new federal budget, saw stepped-up spending "in every avenue of welfarism," and wondered "just how the 'new Republicanism' of the Eisenhower Administration differs from the Fair Deal--unless partisanship prompts the conclusion that the Democrats would be spending even more lavishly." New York's Daily Mirror took a dim view of the "strange bipartisan silence" over "the deep resentment among the people against high taxation."

For those who like their experts to offer hard figures, New York Post Financial Columnist Sylvia F. Porter tipped readers to the latest professional gambling odds on the election: 4 to 1 in favor of Ike, narrowed from the 5 to 1 before the Democratic convention.

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