There's a request from an old friend and close-reader of this writer for what he calls "a Democratic column." And his request follows close on the heels of comment by another friend, quote:
"Yes, Brodie, you are voting the Democratic ticket, and just because your people, as far back you can remember, were Democrats," end quote.
Well, what's wrong with that, we asked her. The situation hasn't shown any vast improvement, either local, national or international, with a Republican in the White House these last eight years.
There's a lot of talk about declining prestige abroad, with Republicans saying it's all the Democrats' fault, and Democrats blaming it on the Republicans.
Such claims and counterclaims, as to just who is the whipping- boy, are an old story, dating to the founding of the Republic. And the Toms, Dicks and Harrys across succeeding generations have shrugged collective shoulders, called it "politics as usual," and managed, somehow, to live through it.
Personally, we doubt if national prestige Is so far gone that it couldn't bounce back tomorrow if the United States managed to put say a three-ton satellite in orbit. Which is the business of scientists and. technicians, and in nowise related to a presidential election.
And until our scientific know-how catches up with the other feller's, we'll just have to keep on looking at front-pictures of Russia’s Khrushchev giving bear-hugs to our enemies.
In the meantime we vote for Jack Kennedy, and no apologies. We like his smile.
When we were born in 1898, President McKinley wasn't quite halfway through his first term in the White House. And we were Junior in high school! before the Democrats managed to put their man in same.
Up until then we Democrats had been "have-nots" at the national table. Does good old Cy Higgs remember an observation he made on the playground at Archer High, the morning after the presidential election of 1912, and in the hearing of Ernest Waldauer whose father was Greenville's postmaster at the time?
"Well," said Cyrus, "we've got us a Democratic president, and now maybe we can have a Democratic postmaster!"
Eight years passed before the Republicans got back into the executive mansion and, when they did, a heap of disconsolate Democrats thought they were there for good. Does Wiltse Kretschmar remember what he said to us, in the Greenville Cotton Exchange, the morning after the presidential election of 1928, when Al Smith had gone down swinging?
"I tell you, Brodie," said Banker Kretschmar, "there are just naturally too many Republicans!"
Thirty-two years later Dick Nixon Is wooing Southern voters with a flattering bill of goods that goes something like this:
"There are more of you Democrats than there are of us Republicans, so come on over to my side, since I cannot be elected if you don't!"
And this from a guy who once summed up the Roosevelt-Truman administrations as "Twenty Years of Treason."
