By Thomas L. Stokes
With Willkie in Wisconsin –
Wendell L. Willkie is carefully building up, in his Wisconsin primary campaign, a middle-of-the-road philosophy designed to attract the large independent vote.
Upon this he is resting his chief claim for renomination as Republican presidential candidate.
Mr. Willkie is frank about his objective. As he describes it, the only way the party can win is to adopt a forward-looking program, both domestically and internationally, to appeal to the independent vote.
He estimates that vote as between 35 and 40 percent of the electorate. That seems high. But polls show a much larger percentage of voters undecided this year than usual, which indicates a greater degree of independence.
His is a difficult task. He is trying to show, on the one hand, that he is not a New Dealer, not still a Democrat, not “another Roosevelt” and, on the other, that he is not an old-line GOP-type Republican.
When he arrived here, he found the air full of talk that he is not a real Republican. He has been dangling these rumors before his audiences – rumors, as he describes them, that “I’m a carbon copy of Roosevelt,” that I’m in league with Roosevelt,” that “I’m trying to help the administration.”
He says:
I’ve never talked politics with President Roosevelt in my life.
Not Democrat or New Dealer
Then he reads his bill of particulars in proof that he’s not a Democrat or New Dealer.
On foreign policy, he specifies, he has disagreed in a number of instances with the administration, including most recently the Polish question. He even went so far as to accuse the administration of having no foreign policy.
On domestic policy, he charges the administration with poor administration and the President with having a Cabinet of “yes men.” Outstanding men are needed, he says. He holds up two Cabinet members as horrible examples – Secretary of Agriculture Wickard and Secretary of Labor Perkins.
The independent commissions in Washington, he says, should be more independent. They are too much under the executive thumb.
He saves his heaviest attack for the “power complex” which he attributes to President Roosevelt and the administration, and he describes the New Deal regime as being “tired and cynical,” with a supreme belief that they know what is good for everybody in the country. This, he concedes, is often a sincere belief, but the egotism of it he deplores as the result of people being too long in power.
Tempers criticism of New Deal
He tempers his criticism of the New Deal by admitting that it has achieved some worthwhile reforms. He speaks harshly of those who are against everything just to be against, who react adversely to everything the administration does.
He says:
They are not thinkers – they are just pathological.
On the other hand, he denounces stand-pat Republicanism as bitingly as any Democrat ever did, and, if he should get nominated, President Roosevelt, or any of his campaign speakers, would be able to quote him at length without bothering to coin any new phrases.
He tells time after time, here in Wisconsin where isolationism was so prevalent, how he fought for Lend-Lease and he takes credit for helping to get the bill through Congress, though 80% of the Republican Party leadership, he says, was against it.
In telling an audience at Manitowoc yesterday that they must “bear in mind always that the objective of the party is to advance social relations,” he said:
I’m anxious to remove the impression that the Republican Party is a brutal, cold party that does not recognize social obligations.