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Republican balance sheet as of April 1 is much less impressive. The party has no leader. The only claimants to the title —Messrs. Hoover, Landon, Borah et al.— are not compelling personalities. G. O. P. had 17,000,000 votes at last count but these were able to elect only five Governors, seven Senators, 89 Congressmen. It has no patronage to speak of. In place of able Mr. Farley it has brash Mr. Hamilton, whose talents, whatever they may be, have not had a chance to develop in the atmosphere of stale controversy which has surrounded him since 1936. One more thing which the G. O. P. has and the Democrats have not is a Committee of 200 to draw up a Program. Organized last autumn to appease Mr. Hoover, whose scheme of a mid-term convention was declined, the Committee's sole act to date has been to elect University of Wisconsin's onetime President Glenn Frank chairman. Whether the Committee should be listed as an asset or a liability will presumably remain undecided until next winter when it releases its report—of which, to the party's practical politicians, the only real virtue appears to be the fact that it will not be released until after election.
On any such balance sheet the Republican Party's main asset does not appear. This is Depression, the chief cause assignable to the Gallup poll's recent indication that the G. O. P.'s 90 Representatives would be increased by 85. An infallible rule of U. S. politics has always been that bad times, whether justifiably or not, are always attributed by voters to the party in power, which consequently gets ousted. Current Depression, which more plausibly than most, can be attributed to the Federal Government, gives the G. O. P. what it has not had since 1928, a real and resounding issue. Whether it is lively enough to capitalize it remains to be seen but at least the party which last year looked as though it were hunting for the legendary valley where elephants trudge to die was once more very much a going concern. Its headquarters last week were not the Program Committee's offices in Chicago but the busy suite in Washington's National Press Club Building, where the staff of Practical Politician Joe Martin's Republican Congressional Committee was figuring out ways and means to round up votes.