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Paul Varies McNutt. Wrote observant William Allen White (in the spring number of The Yale Review): "Paul Vories McNutt is merely Garner in a high hat, a white vest, a pongee silk scarf, pumps, and the glamour of a movie hero. Where Garner's lower-caste friends and supporters keep an ever-ready shotgun to enforce their racial superiority, the gentleman from Indiana's friends and supporters have an automatic ready for subversive influences. . . . He represents deep, conscious, black reaction in the Democratic Party, and like his modern prototypes who have grabbed power, he may walk to power as an advanced liberal. Mussolini and Hitler were both socialists. McNutt, youngest [48] of the Democratic candidates I am mentioning, may go a long way to the Left before he turns his corner."
Also Available. Some citizens last week still clung to the old gold standard of Herbert Hoover, 65, who is now recognized as a human being, and whose administration no longer looks quite so terrible as it did in 1932. To the right even of Mr. Hoover, and with a similar political Crossley rating ("poison"), stands Rochester, N. Y. Publisher Frank Gannett, 63, a rock-ribbed loather of the New Deal, now cam paigning the country in his private plane, a solid, stolid, old-school businessman. In the road's middle is Michigan's Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg, 56, still "available," though apparently somewhat relieved that he will probably not get the job he has often called "crucifixion."
Of those candidates not actively campaigning, U. S. Attorney General Jackson, 48, a hardheaded corporation lawyer, a crusading idealist, is the dream boy of the New Dealers, Franklin Roosevelt's idea of the specifications for a truly great U. S. President. Pleasantly normal, he charms fat cats and leftists alike; pale, persuasive, one of the ablest trial lawyers of the last decade, Mr. Jackson thinks the rich are too rich, the poor too poor. He is also Franklin Roosevelt's idea of a great Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but has a horror of being buried alive. Mr. Jackson is smooth: no handles.
Ohio's Governor Bricker, pet of the Republican Party's chief contributors, is unpopular outside of Ohio because of the Cleveland relief row last winter. The strategy of his supporters is simple: when Mr. Taft is either deadlocked or fails to gain, Mr. Bricker will be unveiled, and the convention will be shown the necessity of carrying pivotal Ohio, fourth in electoral votes (26). Warm-smiling, farm-bred Mr. Bricker, plain-talking, handsome in a luncheon-club way, a no-frills country lawyer, unquestionably stood last week as first-grade, second-rank G. O. P. material.
Burton Kendall Wheeler. Last week a man who was first-grade, first-rank Democratic material returned to Washington after a rapid prowl through California. A lanky, rumpled man who walks with a rapid shamble, smiling quizzically, his glance a friendly, direct glare through octagonal spectacles, smoking a cigar with the superb nonchalance of Groucho Marx, Montana's Burton K. Wheeler is a man of 58 who is not just another cow-country Senator but a Washington landmark.