POLITICAL NOTES: 1940

>Having raised many a squawk about balancing the national budget, the Republican National Committee last week confronted their own whacking deficit of $660,000, decided to wheedle 660 well-stocked Republicans into contributing $1,000 each toward a clean slate in 1940.

> Seven years of Franklin Roosevelt have taught Republicans, high & low, to turn the beady eye of suspicion on "That Man's" every proposal. Hence they looked sharply at a suggestion emanating from "a source close to the President": That the public interest might best be served by a postponement of the 1940 conventions to a later date than usual.*

Extraordinarily infuriating was this mild suggestion to G. O. P. politicians. For many a month they have been debating this question: How to pick a candidate who will be the antithesis of the Democratic nominee before they know who the latter gentleman will be?

>From Sacramento to San Francisco to Portland last week New Hampshire's Senator Harry Styles Bridges† bounded like a bandersnatch. Object of bulgy, lusty Senator Bridges' travels and speeches was to plug himself for the G.O.P. Presidential nomination. He hammered indiscriminately at the whole New Deal, showed himself to many a far-western Republican. Observing Mr. Bridges' progress with pride & prejudice were his two wealthy young angels: Edmund Converse, 32, short, blond, dynamic, whose grandfather founded the Bankers Trust Co. of New York; and tall, deliberate Palmer Beaudette, 26, whose grandfather once made Model-T bodies for Ford.

>New York's Representative Hamilton Fish admitted modestly that he might have to run for the Presidency next year in order to keep as a dominant issue his "Keep-America-Out-of-War" slogan. Dryly the dry New York Times headlined this news : "Fish Issues Threat to Seek Presidency."

>Also "available" became bodacious, New-Deal-loathing Frank Gannett, Rochester, N. Y. publisher, and chairman of his own National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government. While Mr. Gannett was away (on a Western speaking tour), the office mice began to play, nominated him in an editorial written without his knowledge, and without his robust style. In Spokane, Wash., pleased Mr. Gannett bumbled: "No American . . . would decline the nomination if it were offered him.*Mr. Gannett had been nominated before: by British Press Peer Lord Beaverbrook last year (TIME, Aug. 22, 1938).

> In Kansas City, Mo., Ohio's Senator Robert A. Taft crossed a picket line and a precedent to dine at the Kansas City Club—despite the fact that the A. F. of L.'s Hotel and Restaurant Employes' union has picketed the club for a year.

> Princeton University freshmen chose Adolf Hitler as "greatest living person" (no close second); Franklin Roosevelt "greatest living American."