National Affairs: Claim to the Future

Early in the campaign the Republicans staked out "peace, progress and prosperity" as their most powerful argument for Ike's reelection. Democrats replied that the Republicans merely want to keep things as they are, and proclaimed that they saw no magic in the G.O.P. promise. Last week Vice President Richard Nixon, barnstorming through the West and Midwest on a sweeping 32-state, 15,000-mile tour, took a G.O.P. handhold on the future.

"Our hope," the Vice-President told a full-house audience of 1,800 in the Colorado Springs, Colo. High School auditorium, "is to double everyone's standard of living in ten years . . . We see the time not too far distant when we can have a four-day work week and family life will be even more fully enjoyed by every American . . . These are not dreams or idle boasts—they are simple projections of the gains we have made in the last four years."

Immediate Republican goals:

¶ "To wipe out the remaining pockets of distress and economic discrimination in the United States."

¶ "To wipe out the bitterness and class struggle" fostered by the Democrats.

¶ "To promote a new way of life—better than we ever had" by developing machines and electronic devices that will eliminate "backbreaking toil and mind-wearying tension."

There is no name, said Nixon, for the Republican philosophy. But "whatever it is, it is something new and far better than anything the world has ever seen."