JUDGEMENTS & PROPHECIES: THE ELECTION: A POST-MORTEM

THE BALTIMORE SUN: FOR the better part of two years, this has been a dispirited Administration. Tuesday's results, we believe, were primarily the reflection of that and of the consequent public uneasiness.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: THE responsibility for this disaster, when you come right down to it, must rest on President Eisenhower. It was he who had the sense of direction and lost it; it was he who should have nurtured a party to support his ideas and did not.

THE DENVER POST: OUR view is that millions of people were shaken by Republican doubletalk over the budget two years ago, the U.S. lag in missiles and the race for outer space, the incredible confusion over civil defense, the Sherman Adams case, Little Rock, and the antics of John Foster Dulles. It all adds up to weak, distracted and irrationalized leadership.

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE : HAVING done its best to alienate its only possible supporters, the Republican party ought not to have been surprised when it found itself without friends.

Columnist ROSCOE DRUMMOND: THE overriding political fact is that the Republican Right wing was decimated. Wherever the Republicans lost, it was almost uniformly the extreme Republican conservatives who fell by the wayside. Wherever the Republicans won, it was almost invariably the Republican liberals—the Eisenhower Republicans, the "modern" Republicans—who withstood and in New York turned back the Democratic avalanche.

Columnist DAVID LAWRENCE: AS sure as day follows night, if the if, Republican party advertises its nominee as a "modern Republican" next time, it will increase the stay-at-home Republican vote, and surely elect the Democratic Presidential nominee.

Columnist JOSEPH ALSOP : IT is perfect nonsense, in fact, to talk of these 1958 results in terms of a gigantic, irresistible tidal wave. What looked like a tidal wave was first of all the sum of a long series of local Republican choices of candidates obviously likely to repel the maximum number of votes. Wherever the Democrats committed comparable follies, as they did here and there, they also suffered.

THE LOS ANGELES MIRROR-NEWS: ONCE again the G.O.P. was portrayed as the party of the rich, the selfish and of "big business." And once again the Democratic party appeared as that of the little fellow, the workingman and of "the middle class." A reconstructed Republican party has a priceless opportunity today. For between the nether wings of both major parties, there exists a tremendous vacuum, aching to be filled.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: THE right-wing "Old Guard" of the Republican party has, it is good to say, now dwindled almost to nothingness.

THE DALLAS NEWS: TIME is short. The forces of conservatism in Washington are dwindling [to] men like Harry Byrd, [Barry] Goldwater. When they are gone, we all are gone.

THE RICHMOND NEWS LEADER: IN this debacle there were many losers, not the candidates alone, but the G.O.P. as a whole, Vice President Nixon as an individual and (let us face the grim truth) the South as a region.

THE WASHINGTON POST AND TIMES HERALD : IT is too bad that the Democratic Party could not have had the same sort of purge of its more extreme troglodytic elements that the voters administered to the Republicans.