Last week Wendell Willkie appeared to justify the miracle of his nomination at Philadelphia. With the gong ringing for the tenth round, with the wise guys yelling "Take him out!", with his defenses battered down, he got up off the canvas, and waded back in, trading punch for punch.
Nearly everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, either through the demonic perversities of politics, or because Wendell Willkie had missed with some haymaker rights & lefts. (Nobody denied he was good at infighting.) Now he knew better what it meant to "meet the champ." For daily Franklin Roosevelt threw a bigger punch in the form of action as President, than Wendell Willkie could muster in the form of argument as Candidate.
At that point last week Pollster Gallup came in with a killer: 55% of the popular vote for Roosevelt, 45% for Willkie; Roosevelt—453 electoral votes, Willkie—78; Roosevelt—38 States, Willkie—10.
It was as if the referee had hit one fighter with a stool. In the corner, Willkie's handlers wept (some of them crocodile tears) or swore. But the bearlike man from Indiana wouldn't admit he was licked. Even veteran newshawks begged him to cut down on his extraordinarily grueling speaking schedule. Smiling, he upped the pace, talked more, louder, longer. More important, he began to say things that bit.
For an amateur getting experience the hard way, Nominee Willkie's Western trip began to seem perfectly planned—in an unexpected way. Last week's political errors were made in rockbound Democratic areas, where Republicans are classed with horned toads as amusing but unessential creatures. He had found his voice again in safely Republican Kansas, to the pretended delight of New Deal partisans (who wisecracked that Nominee Willkie lost a thousand votes every time he said "Presunistace" for President of the United States).
At Tulsa Mr. Willkie drew a tremendous crowd (40,000); at Amarillo, 10,000 hospitable, curious Texans listened lukewarmly to his appeal that they exchange their 80-year-old tradition of voting the straight Democratic ticket for the 160-year-old No-Third-Term tradition.
In back-platform appearances across New Mexico the candidate began to learn to use the microphone. He talked of the New Deal's "drunken orgy of spending"; promised "honest jobs for honest work in honest industry"; and always, everywhere, blasted the Chicago "draft," declaring again & again "I am not an indispensable man."
He went well, generally, although small, presumably, were his vote-getting results in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona.
By plane the challenger entered California. His technique had improved consistently. He had been booed, heckled and hooted at by scattered partisans throughout the Southwest; but had turned off the hecklers neatly on most occasions. He had moved in close to the microphone. He had drawn unprecedented crowds. Still he had flopped repeatedly. Only in California did train observers begin to realize that they had set an impossibly high standard for Wendell Willkie—that they had expected him to leap from political miracle to miracle until he appeared in a burning bush on Election Day.