DEMOCRATS: The Moment of Truth

Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey, the only formally declared candidate for the presidency,* has a problem. His campaign managers have carefully written a moderate's role for him. on the reasonable theory that it will be popular with the voters. But whenever Humphrey takes the speaker's stand, he invariably throws the script away and becomes a wildcat liberal, promising the world to his listeners. "And the people in front of him just don't want the world right now," explains a worried Humphrey advocate. In his offstage moments, Humphrey himself senses the public's present wariness of pie-in-the-sky liberalism. "It's the most dangerous thing in the world," he says. "That's what happened to Stevenson."

In a sense, Hubert Humphrey arrived on the political scene too late. His brand of liberal was more at home in the mid-New Deal years, when a popular politician was the intellectual spellbinder who opened the floodgates of the U.S. Treasury with his Phi Beta Kappa key and let the dollars flow over the Depression-parched land. Humphrey's problem is painfully shared by all Democratic liberals. In midsummer 1959, it is growing ever clearer that the Democrats have all but come to the end of the line on the New Deal-born issues that have served them for a quarter-century. And as at no other time since F.D.R.'s day, the best intellects of the Democratic Party are searching for a meaningful role for liberalism in a prospering U.S.

Up the Tough Way. The big change did not come in a twinkling. Humphrey's own Senate Class of 1948 was the last to go to Washington with Fair Deal liberals predominating. Since then, the old appeals have gradually faded. Many an orthodox liberal has lost his enthusiasm for big farm supports, big housing dreams, and big labor. And as the U.S. public has changed to a pay-as-you-go attitude, so have the liberals changed. "These men," says Indiana's freshman Democratic Congressman John Brademas of his classmates, "are well educated. Yet they have an earthiness about them. They worked up the tough way. They did not float in on any cloud of reform, or come in on coattails or by flukes."

But today the change has become joltingly clear to the vintage liberals because of two events: 1) the nation's rapid surge from recession to boom without the big spending promised by the liberals in November, and 2) the failure of the attempts of Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler and the old-line liberals to force the congressional Democrats into a free-spending collision with Ike. Such a collision course, the liberals in Congress agree, would be foolish and unrealistic. Says one Senate liberal: "The Democratic National Committee is like a government in exile. They keep operating the same way even though they are out of power, but meantime the country changes."