CAMPAIGN JAM AT DEAD CENTER

...Lister Hill, Alabama Democrat, for the use of federal funds to provide more classrooms...

...As a matter of arithmetic, the President's State of the Union message made it clear just how close the two forces are on that issue...

...But before Symington was able to engage in a preliminary attack, the Republicans added a billion dollars to their proposed expenditures for arms, most of it allocated to the Air Force...

...The President's failure to renew his call for bonds showed he had dropped the scheme which Congress defeated last year...

...Under ordinary circumstances, they would have felt compelled to swallow their annoyance and make the best possible terms with the party spokesman in the Senate...

...But it all turned out to be a false alarm...

...Certainly, the political realities require that the Democrats convince the mass of voters that there is a genuine difference between them and Republicans—especially if the Republicans prevail upon President Eisenhower to run again...

...Even while those demands were being uttered, there came an inspired leak from within the Administration which created the impression the White House was going to ask for a total of $4,900,000,000 for military and economic programs...

...Another popular argument is that we should reduce our taxes before entering any more foreign "giveaways...

...Angry members of Congress charged they had been deceived...

...As his Democratic colleagues strive to help George, they grow more and more opposed to foreign spending, even though their position would seem to represent a major reversal of tradition and a retreat of considerable magnitude for the party that identifies itself with liberalism and internationalism...

...Clements is going to spend much of his mental and physical energy trying to get renominated next summer in a Kentucky primary fight with whatever candidate his old enemy Governor A. B. Chandler puts against him...

...The President's message stressed the fact that, in order to be effective with our foreign assistance, we must give our friends some assurance of what we will do in the future...

...If there is, indeed, even that little difference between the two parties, the country probably should be grateful for the opportunity to distinguish between them...

...On tax reduction, it will be midsummer before each side makes up its mind whether it wants to be the champion of a balanced budget or whether it wants to get credit for making the voters' levies lighter in a Presidential year...

...They left to the Democrats the unaccustomed role of calling for an end to foreign spending...

...It would be an understatement to say that the inspired stories about increased spending abroad, most of it for arms, created a sensation...

...If there ever was a man entitled to be called Mr...

...Foreign Affairs, it is the 77-year-old Senator from Georgia...

...Even the 18-year-old voters of Georgia and Kentucky are not too young to remember that, since World War II, it has been Democratic Party doctrine that money spent helping our friends is money well spent to strengthen the forces of freedom in the world...

...The President called for the expenditure of $1,250,000,000 in federal funds over a five-year period...

...III While the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee speaks as one who has long supported international cooperation, current policy actually is being set by a Georgian who long has opposed international assistance programs...

...The outstanding political reality of early 1956 is that the people who are in charge of the two parties have convinced themselves this is not the year to be caught either to the right or left of center...

...The Administration is ready to join forces with the Democrats on a compromise highway construction bill, abandoning its proposal to obtain the money by a vast bond sale...

...But if the Democrats in House and Senate don't show there actually is a difference between them and the Republicans, it's going to be hard for precinct workers to argue the point...

...And pending the time when all such expenditures can be stopped, Democratic leaders are exerting pressure to require that the money be spent not for dams and other forms of industrial development but for weapons to be put into the hands of primitive peoples, supposedly for use against Communists...

...Despite his heart ailment, Johnson is holding on to the Senate leadership...

...Now that each of them is recuperating from a heart attack, there is no reason to expect Johnson to be any tougher than he was...

...The most effective argument used by Talmadge and those advancing his views is that a nation which can't spend enough money to provide flood walls and power dams and school buildings for its own people has no business spending money for similar projects in foreign nations...

...Such a lopsided division in favor of military spending led the New York Times to say: "The kind of aid that warms the holiday heart is the kind that builds a dam in Egypt, develops water for the thirsty lands of Jordan, increases crop yields in India, Indonesia, and the heart of Africa...

...To heighten the drama, Nelson Rockefeller, one of those who led the futile fight for economic assistance rather than military assistance, resigned, for whatever reasons, from the post of director for psychological warfare...

...In its place, he called merely for "an adequate plan of financing...

...This willingness to be different had led Knowland to raise the one loud dissent in the chorus of Republican voices demanding that no one make a move toward the Presidential nomination until Eisenhower gives the word...

...Even in his most robust days, Lyndon Johnson handled President Eisenhower with kid gloves...

...That is one reason they have felt free to cut loose from their own leader, William F. Knowland...

...social security fields as health insurance...

...If such a state of affairs robs a national election of any meaning, the politicians are willing to let the professors worry about that...

...The foul-up began in December when the Cabinet and National Security Council met at Camp David, in the Catoctin Mountains, and when the Congressional leaders met the President at the White House...

...But with the Democrats trying to look as much like Republicans as possible, there is no pressing need for the President's lieutenants to worry greatly about a legislative program...

...But those small voices are drowned in the weighty tones of Walter F. George...

...That word brought demands from liberal groups, including ADA, that there be an increase in economic programs in such areas as India, Burma, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Ceylon, Pakistan...

...In the hands of Herman Talmadge, such issues could sweep out of the Senate even so distinguished a figure as Walter George...

...It is true that around the periphery of the Democratic Party there is a demand that the emphasis be put upon economic help, but not upon arms...

...IV On other issues too there is, at the moment at least, great difficulty telling who are the Republicans and who are the Democrats...

...Hence, there can be little surprise that George is growing more and more vocal in his demands for reduction of foreign spending...

...The slick operators at the White House thus will find the Democratic Senate Leadership crippled by the preoccupation of Lyndon Johnson, I Walter George, and Earl Clements...

...The stubborn Californian may cling too tenaciously to some mistaken ideas, but at least he does not hover over the middle of the road, fearful of being caught too near the political ditches on each side...

...Such gadflies as Americans for Democratic Action have been making nuisances of themselves, trying to get the Democratic Party leadership to see the enormous possibilities for good in an imaginative program of foreign aid as an instrument in the struggle of competitive co-existence...

...As Dulles explained it, the Administration really wasn't asking for more spending—what it wanted was a bit of money to replace some military items in the pipeline...

...After each meeting, it was said that the Administration did not intend to spend any more money abroad this year than it did last year...

...That implied that expenditures would continue at the rate of $2,700,-000,000 divided into $1,100,000,000 for military programs and $1,600,000,-000 for economic programs...

...Gone, it seems, is the Democratic issue Senator Stuart Symington was nursing so carefully...

...It is, therefore, of the utmost significance that Walter George has made himself the spokesman for those who have demanded that the paring knife, even the meat ax, be used without mercy upon appropriations for foreign spending...

...The person setting that policy is not even a public official, though he hopes to become one soon...

...With rare exceptions among die-hard reactionary Republicans and unreconstructed Democratic liberals, both sides are committed to doing "just a little" in such ROBERT L. RIGGS Is Washington correspondent of the touisville Courier-Journal...

...But perhaps this fetish for being just a little liberal and just a little conservative may be destroyed before the session is half over...

...The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee has an influence within the Democratic Party and within the Eisenhower Administration that goes beyond the fabulous...

...Thus far, the Democratic campaign tactic has been to say, yes, Mr...

...With prodding from the Eisenhower lieutenants in the White House, the Republicans, seeking to toe the center stripe as closely as possible, have inched their way a few short steps toward the welfare state...

...The Missouri Democrat, speaking as a former Secretary for Air, had been expected to indict the Eisenhower Administration for choking our defense program to death in order to balance the budget...

...Whatever may be his shortcomings Knowland furnishes a pleasant contrast in a chamber full of political look-alikes...

...It was a Democratic program which became national policy through the help of Republican internationalists...

...That has been the base of all our expenditures abroad, from the British loan through the Greek-Turk program, the Marshall Plan, and Point Four...

...He is Herman Talmadge, who for many months breathed hotly down the back of George's neck in an effort to frighten him out of the Senate race...

...It is folly, of course, to pretend that his deputies, acting under the orders of a man who may be tired and irritable much of the time, will be effective...

...Chief cause for the disappearance of distinguishing marks has been the traffic jam created by the wild scramble to get in the middle of the road...

...Pending that determination, there will, of necessity, be a delay in choosing up sides on the issue...

...It probably would be even more grateful, however, if they occupied their rightful historic positions, with the Democrats rallying once more behind the banner of Point Four and the Republicans crusading for a balanced budget...

...The Democratic bill, which went through the House committee last year, would provide $1,600,000,000 in four years...

...The Eisenhower Administration got itself so snarled up in its own plans that the early weeks of the session were consumed trying to find out what it actually wants to do in the field of foreign assistance...

...Who is there to carry the fight against the Republicans, especially in the Senate...

...Bulwarked by the action of the White House Conference on Education, the Eisenhower Administration has retreated from its insistance that federal aid to education be limited to helping states and school districts sell bonds...

...The Republicans are headed, in line with the President's message, for a "soil bank" device to revive, under another label, the old New Deal practice of paying farmers not to grow crops...

...That sum, according to the leak, was to be divided into $3,000,000,000 for military, as against $1,900,000,000 for economic...

...The goal of 35,000 additional units of public housing for which the President called is below the figure which the Democrats will ask, but also is higher than anything either party hopes to push through Congress...

...U But in all this scrambling of principles, issues, partisanship, and choosing up of sides, nowhere is the mixup greater than over the fundamental question of spending American money for the economic development of those countries which are, or might be, on our side in the struggle against world communism...

...The problem is not to get bills enacted—the problem is to grab the political credit after like-thinking Democrats and Republicans have passed the bills...

...As Eisenhower put it, "our friends . . . need assurance of continuity in economic assistance for development projects and programs which we approve and which require a period of years for planning and completion...

...At the outset of a session which, by all the rules, should be devoted to working up just the right pitch of partisan belligerency for the Presidential and Congressional campaign, Republicans and Democrats look more alike than at any time in three decades...

...In their eagerness to be just a little conservative, both sides are pledged to do "something" about housing...

...By contrast, the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Harry Truman, of George C. Marshall, of Dean Acheson is murmuring quite loudly that there must be an end soon to all expenditures for foreign assistance...

...So both sides were back where they started, with the faint difference that the President and the Secretary of State had put the Administration on record as looking upon foreign assistance—so long as it didn't grow too large—as part of our permanent policy...

...Let us not forget that food, shelter, and old fashioned kindness are also weapons in our cold war...

...They were confident a tax reduction bill could be put through at the time when it would do the most good politically...

...In addi-tion, Senator Johnson's chief deputy, Earle C. Clements, is going to have a minimum of time and thought to give to leadership problems...

...With the natural publicity advantage which the party of a President holds in such a contest, the Republicans feel they are in position to get credit for what the country likes about Congress and to dump blame for what is unpopular on the Democrats...

...The President's spokesmen in both House and Senate were not dismayed by his suggestion that taxes not be cut before it is clear the budget can be balanced and something applied to the national debt...

...This has led to a natural irritation on the part of the occupants of the White House...

...Hence, under the never-very-militant leadership of Lyndon Johnson of Texas, the Senate Democrats are committed to a legislative program of mild do-goodism...

...Even the farm problem seems about to decline as a bonanza for the Democrats...

...Under Oveta Culp Hobby's successor, Marion B. Folsom, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare has virtually adopted the program advanced by Sen...

...It developed that the White House and the Republican State Department were no more eager for increased economic aid to our friends than was the Democratic leadership of the Senate...

...The fact that Senator George has a long record of support for all forms of international collaboration makes it virtually impossible to carry on an effective fight against his views now...

...Eisenhower is a nice man, but that Republican Party he belongs to...

...But if there is one distinguishing, identifying mark in this look-alike Congress, it is that the followers of Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, the political heirs of Arthur Vandenberg, have accepted foreign assistance as something like a permanent institution, or at least something that will be with us for a decade...

...The result is that on the very issues which should reveal genuine ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans, the leadership of the two parties is in almost complete agreement...