"Time for a Change"

Candidate Dewey opened the week with a 15-minute radio address on taxes, delivered from his desk in the dark, mid-Victorian Governor's Mansion in Albany. He had a clear opening of the kind he likes: the President's own Harry Hopkins had just announced himself a convert to free enterprise and the use of taxes to stimulate business rather than reform it (see BUSINESS). Said Governor Dewey: "The highest New Dealers at last admit that this Administration has created an impossible situation."

The "New Deal's lack of consistent tax policy was rich ground. Tom Dewey plowed it up & down and crosswise. After hammering again at "The Roosevelt Depression," with its 10,000,000 unemployed in 1940, he argued that a main reason was "that our present Administration never once established a policy encouraging people to do business. It never once had a stable policy that allowed people to make plans."

He said that "the New Deal changed our tax laws 15 times in twelve years and only made things worse," that "it actually passed two revenue acts that were out of date before they could even go into effect, because new laws had been passed."

The GOPIedges. He criticized the unnecessary complexity of the laws, citing a ripe example from the present Revenue Act: "They shall not be deductible under subsection (a) but shall be deductible, if deductible under subsection (a) without regard to this subsection, under this subsection, but only to the following extent." Added Dewey dryly: "From there on it gets technical."

As the G.O.P. tax policy, Dewey then made a set of six pledges, aiming them basically at a consistent, national tax policy—directed toward achieving full employment and a rising national income. The pledges included reductions of personal and corporate income-tax rates, and a complete overhaul of the entire tax situation toward clarity, simplicity and stability.

The address, though brief, was shrewdly aimed: Candidate Dewey was picking an inviting and wide-open target; he knew that it would take an extraordinary amount of New Deal ingenuity to devise an honest and sense-making defense of eleven years of tax boggling by the White House, the Treasury, and a Democratic Congress.

Candidate Dewey then took it easy, awaiting the President's second speech. And while Mr. Roosevelt's V-1 had jarred him visibly (TIME, Oct. 2), the White House V-2 speech seemed to make Tom Dewey actually happy. He listened to Mr. Roosevelt's repudiation of Communist support, and then, with the air of a man who has held back too long, said "I shall be compelled to discuss it quite openly."

The Confidence. The Governor and Mrs. Dewey visited St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Al Smith's casket lay, then boarded the ten-car train for Charleston, W.Va. The Governor was in a confident mood. This mood the Governor carried into his speech that night. Clearly he felt that he had taken the Champ's hardest blows, and that his own steady body-punching was wearing his opponent down. The speech kept up that hammering of the Administration.

Into it Dewey again wove the main themes and catch words of his campaign, from the base of his continual "It's time for a change."