DEWEY IS IN FAVOUR FOR U.S. PRESIDENCY

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 October 1948, Page 6

DEWEY IS IN FAVOUR FOR U.S. PRESIDENCY

NEW YORK, Oct. 16

Seventeen days before the election, public opinion polls are unanimously declaring that Mr Thomas E. Dewey the Republican Party’s candidate, will win the Presidency of the United States by a substantial majority, and that the Republicans will retain a majority in at least the House of Representatives, and possibly in the Senate, too. Reporters accompanying President Truman (the Democratic Party’s candidate) and Mr Dewey on their campaign tours, almost without exception say that Mr Dewey is certain to be the next President by a comfortable margin, and that the crowds Mr Truman has drawn have been attracted only by the fact that he is President, and are not an indication of the vote he will receive. Truman’s Confidence

Mr Truman himself is supremely confident. He has hammered away at Mr Dewey and “the notorious donothing eightieth Congress.” He has approached his audiences in a friendly, easy-going manner, with no regard for rhetoric or showmanship. Mr Dewey, on the contrary, has conducted one of the most studied campaigns in American history. His manner has been urbane,, his entrances and exits carefully timed, ana his theme has been unity. His strategy has apparently been to hold votes, and not to risk losing them by specific commitments. With the results in the elections for the Presidency and the House a foregone conclusion, political interest centres around the fight for control of the Senate, where there are now 51 Republicans and 45 Democrats, one of whom —Senator Glen Taylor, of Idaho—now supports Mr Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party.

Close Race For Senate The Democrats need to gain only four Republican seats to control the Senate, and even Republicans admit that it will be a close race. Of 32 Senate seats to be filled at this election, the Republicans now hold 17 and the Democrats 15. The consensus of opinion is that 12 seats —eight Republican and four Democrat —may change hands. Mr Truman and Mr Dewey, on their last tours, threw weights into five of the doubtful Senate seats— Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Other doubtful seats are Colorado, lowa, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Wyoming. Mr Dewey And Britain “If Mr Thomas Dewey becomes President, and continues to attach tne same importance to Western European federation as he professes now, a clash with Britain is inevitable,” says Herbert Matthews, London correspondent of the New York Times. “To federate Britain and Western Europe into ‘one strong economic and political unit,’ as Mr Dewey suggested in a recent speech, would destroy the Commonwealth, and neither Britain nor the Dominions would accept sucn a destruction. ~, . . “The British Commonwealth is m a transition stage, in which great strains and stresses threaten a structure that is unique in history. Yet, even when all the weaknesses are granted, there is much that remains—so much, in fact, that the Empire statesmen now conferring in London are elated and. confident, not downcast. The British Commonwealth may be loose, clumsy, and even vague, but it works surprisingly well, as the present conference proves.