National Reports: The Election Kentucky

...And not even the bright, plausible Nixon or the professionals Dirksen and Martin can cover up the fact that Kentucky is normally a Democratic state by something like 3 to 2 in registration and ordinary voting...

...The issue is projected by the visiting orators as being Eisenhower rather than Cooper, his record and his folksiness...

...Cooper never beat a Democrat with anything even faintly approaching Alben Barkley's prestige, power, vested tradition and entrenched affection...

...Senator Cooper is quite gentlemanly about it, saying nothing of years but pointing to the number of speeches he has made as compared to those of his "distinguished" (and "venerable") opponent...

...Joe Martin, the Speaker himself, has been here to tell the people of Kentucky in effect that Cooper is no less than the President's strong right arm, that Eisenhower wants him and needs him, and that the Crusade will fail unless the junior Senator from Kentucky is re-elected...

...On its face, this is something more than foolhardy...

...Now that the party's national campaigners are taking him to their hearts, opening the massive war chest in his service, making him out the Republican of Republicans, uncompromisingly drawing the party line, there is a feeling that they are sacrificing a valuable asset...

...Only two years before, Alben Barkley had carried the state over a strong Republican candidate by 100,000 votes...

...Besides, there is today no such Democratic restlessness as appeared here and elsewhere after the weary expiration of the Truman years...

...Where, they ask, was good friend Eisenhower then...

...Republican Governors are only occasional phenomena, the product of extraordinary circumstances...

...They are going all-out to accomplish the utmost in spectacular vindication, which is what defeat of the Democratic strong man on his own ground would amount to...

...And if Cooper declares his personal irritation at the Dixon-Yates deal and its implications of policy, Democrats have only to point to the record of John Sherman's having to cool his heels in the President's anteroom when he went there to protest...

...The GOP national command has directed an invasion in force to win the day for Senator John Sherman Cooper over old warhorse Alben Barkley, the endearing Veep...

...Truman carried Kentucky by 125,000...

...In 1952, for example, while Adlai Stevenson carried the state by some 900 votes, Cooper beat the incumbent short-term Democratic Senator Underwood by more than 30,000...

...In 1946, when Cooper was first elected to the Senate??for the short term succeeding A. B. Chandler upon Happy's withdrawal into Big Baseball??he defeated the Democratic candidate by 42,000 votes...

...His two previous victories were over second- or third-stringers, both a bit shopworn...

...The former Vice President, husbanding his strength, has begun to step up his pace progressively in the stretch run...

...It makes him a strictly partisan candidate, a captive of the organization, a protege and creature of the regulars...

...True, he lost it by a hairline, but that was before he became the vacationing, golfing, fishing President, approver of the Dixon-Yates contract with all that that dubious concession to private power means in this state of strong REA cooperatives and infatuation with the TVA...

...Up and down the state travels the new-model Vice President, Richard M. Nixon, his glamour fortified by that of his attractive Pat...

...He is as persuasive as his tranquil style permits when he talks of what he has done for river development...

...The record thus shows that Cooper has a strong appeal for Democrats...

...But he may have to stop that...

...Such circumstances are absent...

...In 1948, he was defeated by Senator Virgil Chapman by only 25,000 votes...

...Cooper blames the Democrats for the plight of coal and distress of miners...

...Laying aside Eisenhower as an issue, because in all logic the response to that should not be noticeable among the rank-and-file, what becomes the basis of Republican campaigning...

...All this means, of course, that Republican strategists have accepted the Kentucky Senatorial race as a vital test for the President and his administration...

...There is Barkley's age, of course...

...The Senator has his work cut out...

...Then there is the natural conflict of claims to benefits bestowed on the folks back home...

...Mainly, it obscures the essential Cooper...

...stronger, according to some stories, than for regulars of his own party, who are generally denominated Taft Republicans...

...Eisenhower did not carry Kentucky in the first place...

...Today, the Democrats are for the Old Man, object of affections aged and weathered in generation upon political generation...

...He is 76, and the fact is widely bruited by Republicans, even if only in modulated tones...

...KENTUCKY An able Republican must combat a Democratic legend By Tarleton Collier LOUISVILLE KENTUCKIANS, jealous of their special brand of politics, which a native poet once called "the damnedest," view uncertainly the new look of Republican methods this year...

...Barkley bears down on the "Big Business" sentiments of the Eisenhower Administration and tries to laugh off Cooper's claim to assiduous labors in behalf of constituents, suggesting that it is a little odd to assume that anybody would fail to do as much as he can (or try to do more than is attainable) for the farmers, the workers and the total economy...

...Old observers in Kentucky see this as an extraordinary, if not misguided, plan of campaign...

...He professes to have done more for tobacco farmers than his Democratic predecessors, particularly Barkley in the old campaigner's long run as a Senator...

...whereas Cooper's past successes issued from his aura of independence and his knack of persuading Democratic voters to cross the party line...

...Everett Dirksen comes down from Illinois...