Modified Mandate

Louis Bean must have leaned back in his swivel chair and smiled last Wednesday morning when he read the results of New York's senatorial election. By giving Herbert Lehman a 200,000-vote majority, the electorate helped further to substantiate Bean's remarkable theory, which last year predicted Truman's victory and now calls for a Democratic landslide in 1950.

Administration members jumped on the Democratic sweep in the Empire State to point up their claims of bigger and better things for the Fair Deal. They pointed to victories in traditionally Republican cities like Syracuse and Port Jervis, and to the fact that four Democrats gained city council seats in Philadelphia, of all places. They chuckled over Fulton Lewis' confident pre-election remark that Harry Truman couldn't call Lehman's victory a mandate unless he got a 100,000 majority.

It isn't that good. The Administration will have to produce results in the second session of the 81st Congress; and it will have to strengthen its labor bloc, without which the Fair Deal cannot remain in power. Last week, at the very beginning of the key drive to unseat Senator Taft, a non-union candidate defeated a UAM member in the Detroit mayoralty election--a disturbing start for the campaign against Taft, a campaign which could be the pivotal factor in pre-1952 politics.

The Republicans, of course, face a far worse problem. Mr. Dulles didn't have much to say in his campaign, and what he did say was managed at least as badly as Dewey's fiasco last year. The GOP will have to come up with a new program and new managers if it hopes to get back into power at all. It will have to stop harping on the welfare state, which is evidently a much overrated bugaboo. It will have to turn up some candidates whose virtues extend farther than smooth, untroubled faces and innocuous minds.