CHOOSING A LEADER

Southland Times, Issue 20527, 2 July 1928, Page 7

CHOOSING A LEADER

AMERICAN ELECTIONS

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONCLUDES VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE SELECTED (United Press Assn.—By Telegraph—Copyright.) New York, June 29. Senator Joseph T. Robinson, of Arkansas, was selected as the Democratic candidate for Vice-President. Although this choice was a virtual certainty, the perspiring Democrats were hardly ready to pass over the opportunity for hotweather oratory. Dozens of persons were put into the nomination. In speeches lasting half an hour or more the place literally dripped with felicitous eulogies of the most inconsequential and unknown political figures. It seemed obvious that not by bread did the Democrats live, but by oratory. When the flow of speeches ended Senator Robinson’s nomination was a matter of routine, and was perfunctory. He received 1,032 votes in the first ballot, and the convention did not even make it unanimous. Everybody was gazing homewards, moist and fagged, but satisfied that the convention was over.

The convention received a telegram from Governor Smith accepting nomination and the platform, but reiterating his belief that the States alone were able to secure real temperance and respect for law; also that the present conditions relative to Prohibition were unsatisfactory to the great mass of the American people.—Australian Press Associ-ation-United Service. MR “AL” SMITH. London Daily Telegraph recently gave this sketch of Mr Smith:—“Mr Albert E. Smith, the Governor of the State of New York, is the very antithesis of Mr Hoover. His personal magnetism is irresitible; he is an admirable speaker; he has established his reputation as a sound administrator, and his integrity is as unquestioned as Mr Hoover’s own.

“He, too, has risen from poverty by force of talent and character. If the matter ended there ‘Al’ Smith’s supporters might hope to see him the first Democratic President elected by a majority of the people, on his first candidature, since Grover Cleveland’s narrow victory in 1884. But there are other considerations. Governor Smith is a devout Roman Catholic; he is a vigorous critic of Prohibition; he owes his political eminence in his State to Tammany Hall, and the sinister repute of that organization must be some handicap upon any seeker of national honours, however clean his own hands may be. “All these things tell against Mr Smith throughout the States of the ‘solid south,’ which has voted overwhelmingly as a Democratic block during the sixty years since the Civil War. The south is firmly, even fanatically, Protestant. It is Prohibitionist by rooted conviction. It has a fixed prejudice against politicians from New York, even if untarred by the Tammany brush. To all objections Mr Smith’s proposers have one very simple answer.

“He is, they say, the one man in the party who could make an effective fight against a strong Republican candidate, and if he is to be set aside, the Democrats will be heading straight for a worse electoral disaster than even their recent history can show. If that argument prevails, the subsequent campaign is more than likely to be the most fiercely contested since William Jennings Bryan flung himself into the arena of national politics thirty years ago.” THE DEMOCRAT’S CANDIDATE. (Rec. 5.5 p.m.) Washington, June 29. It is the general conviction in Republican circles that in the nomination of Governor Smith, the Democrats have selected the likeliest candidate. Mr Hoover refrained from making comment. However, the Secretary of the Interior, Dr Hubert Work, who will shortly be en route from Brule in order to submit the resignation of President Coolidge at the summer White House, and thereafter will assume a more active role in the Hoover campaign, declared that Governor Smith was unquestionably the strongest Democrat in the country, and it would be a hard battle. Dr Work and other Republican leaders nevertheless expressed the opinion that the combination of Hoover and Curtis would prove too strong for any combination the Democrats would be able to offer Australian Press Association.