Moderate Mandate

Manifestly we are in for a liberal swing. Let us have no doubt of that. --New York Times

They obviously voted for people that I would class among the spenders, and that is what I say is going to be the real trouble. --Dwight Eisenhower

I saw this trend to liberalism coming a long time ago, when they turned out Bob Tait. P:Ohio Republican

Across the U.S. the politicians and pundits studied the tea leaves of the 1958 elections and forecast the national future. If there was a consensus, it was that the nation has veered to the left after six years of steering down the middle of the road. Yet closer, subsurface examination of the election results raises doubt about that consensus; indeed there is strong evidence that the American voter intended to cast his ballot for moderation.

In last week's elections it was such moderate Republicans as New York's Nelson Rockefeller, Pennsylvania's Hugh Scott and Oregon's Mark Hatfield who scored most dramatically; it was such Old Guard Republicans as Ohio's John Bricker, Nevada's George Malone, Indiana's Harold Handley, California's Bill Knowland and West Virginia's Chapman Rever-omb who took the most sensational drubbings. Clearly the congressional Republican Party had a more middle-road look after the elections than before.

As for Democrats, only rarely did they campaign as full-fledged liberals. Part of their success unquestionably came from the moderate congressional record they had written under Texans Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. During the campaign, when President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon flailed at the Democrats as radicals, the near-unanimous Democratic reply was "Who? Me?" Few if any farm-belt Democrats campaigned for a return to Henry Wallace's Milk for Hottentots days or for the Truman Administration's Brannan Plan. Few marched to victory as all-out defenders of labor faith; indeed the great majority argued for reasonable labor reform. Where Democrats did get tagged as horseback liberals, they often lost, e.g., in Massachusetts, John Saltonstall Jr. and James M. Burns, both members of Americans for Democratic Action, were defeated for Congress even while Democratic Senator John Kennedy was leading the rest of his party to its greatest victory in history.

Thus the Democratic Party did not come out of the 1958 elections with the liberal mandate that the pundits claimed. Instead, Democrats had managed to look more like working moderates than the Republicans do. The biggest remaining question was whether the Democratic Party, in the headiness of its revived power, would remember its moderate mandate.

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