National Affairs: Who Loves Happy Now?

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"Everybody," bawled A. B. Chandler with cheerful immodesty while stumping across Kentucky last fall, "loves ol' Happy." When Kentuckians responded by electing him governor, it looked as though ol' Happy had things sized up about right. Last week the honeymoon ended. Unloving Kentucky Democrats unmercifully dropped Happy's hand-picked candidate for the Democratic senatorial nomination, ex-Representative Joseph B. Bates, 62. Winner by a resounding plurality of 81,000: Senator Earle C. Clements, the incumbent whose political career Chandler had promised to end.

Earle Clements' disruption of Happy's love affair with the people was predictable. In six short months as governor, Chandler had succeeded in treading on sensitive Kentucky toes from the Ohio River to the Big Sandy. Quickly forgetting his campaign economy promises, Happy wheedled $39 million in new taxes out of the legislature, extended state income taxes to take in wage earners making as little as $14 a week, and, perhaps most injudiciously, boosted the state levy on whisky. Rumbled one Kentucky politician: "Not many people would walk out in the yard to vote for anybody, but they'd swim the Ohio to vote against somebody. This time, they came out to get Happy."

But the getting was not a matter of protest vote alone. For in Clements, as ineffective a stump speaker as oratory-loving Kentucky ever produced, Chandler was up against one of the shrewdest organizers in all U.S. politics. Clements, said one Kentuckian, has "made a career out of reaching around incumbent organizations and making his own wheels do the better turning." As majority leader of the state senate in 1944, he organized legislators and other politicians in the Second Congressional District so effectively that when he announced for the House, the incumbent simply retired. As a Congressman, Clements laid the groundwork for his successful campaign for governor, then used his time in the governor's mansion to set up the campaign that put him in the Senate in 1950.

The Democratic State Central Commit tee, firmly under Clements' control even before last week's voting, is expected to name a Clements man as his running mate in Kentucky's other 1956 senatorial contest—for the unexpired term of the late Alben Barkley. About the only consolation left Happy Chandler was that under state law, he can appoint someone to serve in the Barkley post until the November general election.

Republican hopes for electing two Senators from traditionally Democratic Kentucky shone brightly during the time G.O.P. leaders thought they could coax popular ex-Senator John Sherman Cooper, now Ambassador to India, back into partisan politics to run for Barkley's seat. But they dimmed when Cooper, in Massachusetts General Hospital at Boston for minor throat surgery, decided against running last week because his job in India "is only partly accomplished." Cooper's decision not only forced the Republicans to dig up another candidate; it weakened the G.O.P. ticket and hence the chances of Earle Clements' November opponent, able Thruston B. Morton, 48, who resigned as Assistant Secretary of State to make the senatorial race. Morton, a three-term Congressman before entering the Eisenhower Administration, easily won the G.O.P. senatorial nomination.