Editorial: Candidate Roosevelt accepts
Mr. Roosevelt can be either a wartime President and Commander-in-Chief above partisanship, or he can misuse that position as a candidate for a fourth term. Last night, he took advantage of his office to launch a political campaign from a naval base. For months the Republicans had predicted that he would do something like that. We did not believe he would be so crude. We were wrong.
Not that there was anything new in his formal acceptance speech. He used the same I-am-above-politics pose in his advance acceptance from the White House earlier this month, the same Commander-in-Chief excuse for his candidacy. But that he would time a military inspection trop for a partisan appeal to his party convention did not seem quite up to his protestations as expressed in his letter to Chairman Hannegan.
“I shall not campaign in the usual sense for the office,” he said last night. “In these days of tragic sorrow, I do not consider it fitting. In these days of global warfare, I shall not be able to find the time.”
But he found time to route his military train through Chicago for a secret conference with his political chief of staff. He found time to dictate the party platform. He found time from his naval base inspection to run the partisan convention by phone through his party henchmen. He found time to make a partisan campaign speech.
Fortunately, the conduct of the war will not suffer too much. For our real military commanders are forbidden to be political candidates and do not run parties for personal power.
Of course, Mr. Roosevelt does not think he is being partisan. Granted the indispensable idea, the only partisanship is opposition to him. If you vote for him, you transcend party. As he said last night, “in the last three elections the people of the United States have transcended party affiliation.” Or as his spokesman, Convention Chairman Jackson, put it in warning against a Roosevelt defeat: “We must not allow the American ballot box to be made Hitler’s secret weapon.”
Certainly, that is not a “campaign in the usual sense.”