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In the Illinois Senate race, Representative Raymond S. McKeough, candidate of the Kelly-Nash machine, has little present hope of catching the Chicago Tribune's candidate, Republican incumbent Senator C. Wayland ("Curly") Brooks. In Colorado, incumbent Democratic Senator Edwin C. Johnson might lose to Governor Ralph L. Carr.
But practically a cinch to win in California over bumbling, fumbling Governor Culbert L. Olson is the G.O.P. candidate, State Attorney General Earl Warren. A colder cinch is Major General Edward Martin, in Pennsylvania, an old-line Republican, veteran of two wars, who thus far is outdistancing the generally unknown Democrat F. Clair Ross, the State Auditor General. The Michigan race is much closer, but a Republican has the edge—big, popular Harry Kelly, now Secretary of State, who polled in 1940 more votes than anyone has ever polled on any Michigan ballot.
The Roosevelt Problem. Today Flynn actually can do little for this party except have his resignation handy. Beyond the management of multifarious little details, such as shipping speakers into hard-fought districts, Flynn must depend mainly on the real chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Franklin Roosevelt.
The President is already so pressed for time that he has fumbled the political efforts he has made; e.g., the New York campaign. While Flynn is able enough as the Boss of The Bronx, that wilderness of apartment houses which is the greatest single Democratic stronghold north of the Mason & Dixon line, he is no James Aloysius Farley on a national scale, and has never pretended to be. If the President is going to wrest a Democratic victory this fall, he must do it mainly alone.
His greatest ammunition is The Flag—and if he is to wave the Stars & Stripes before the voters this year he must do it in such a way that the citizenry will not resent the maneuver as capitalizing on their patriotism. As a man of conscience he cannot use the war to win an election; as a statesman, he might still have to in order to retain effective working control of the House.
The Flynn Problem. One thing Edward Joseph Flynn, of The Bronx, can do: hold The Bronx fast as the great Democratic fortress. The Bronx is his own, his native land, where the pewter-haired, craggy-faced, hazel-eyed Irishman is master of nearly all he surveys from his ninth-floor terrace apartment.
The firm of Goldwater & Flynn, which prudently takes no Federal or State business, has prospered throughout thick years & thin, and unquestionably will continue to prosper. For all of the 1,349,711 citizens of The Bronx (a population larger than that of any of 15 States; greater than that of the South's three largest cities put together—Houston, New Orleans. Louisville) know Ed Flynn is a solid character, who always delivers when he gives his word. They know he has never had real ambitions outside The Bronx—that he loves it from the zoo (which is one of the world's five or six greatest) to the Yankee Stadium, to the Edgar Allan Poe cottage, to the National Hall of Fame (in which are no native Bronxites).