THE CONVENTION: Loaded List

• Share

The Republican National Committee showed its bias in other ways than the contested-delegates fight. It picked an almost 100% pro-Taft group of convention officials (TIME, June 23), and it loaded the list of invited speakers with a high proportion of Taft partisans.

Elder Statesman Herbert Hoover and Elder Hero Douglas MacArthur were choices at which anti-Taft Republicans could not cavil, though MacArthur was for Taft. But the national committee made no effort to balance these choices by a list of speakers with more appeal to independent voters.

The national committee's list carried the names of only two governors out of 25 G.O.P. governors now in office. The list of Senators was even more remarkable. Bridges of New Hampshire was an obvious choice, since he is the party leader in the Senate. But the other invited Senators, and by that fact certified as distinguished members of the party, were Kem of Missouri, Cain of Washington and McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Lackluster Senator Kem is strongly opposed to "foreign entanglements"; Cain is a windbag; and McCarthy is McCarthy. Millions of independent and convertible voters are looking at their television sets in search of Republicanism's face. The national committee chose to present a face that was not the Republican Party as it is, but the Republican Party as the Democrats say it is.