Who Does Stalin Like?

They say that Ike is dynamite on television, and Kefauver can win votes with the shake of a hand, and that Taft and Truman reap ballots by the bushel with their blunt, give-'em-hell type campaigning. But the most important single factor in the November presidential election may be not the popularity of any of the candidates, but the will of the man everybody hates--Joe Stalin.

Stalin has swayed the American voter before. A week before the 1950 Congressional elections, George Gallup's poll gave the edge to the Democrats. But that very day the Chinese Communists crossed the Yalu River and turned the UN mopup operation in Korea into a bloody retreat. On election day, the size of the Republican victory surprised even Republicans. Whether or not Chinese intervention was timed to influence the voters, it did.

If Stalin could vote in November, of course, his only choice would be between two evils. Both Presidential candidates will be outspokenly opposed to Uncle Joe and all his works. But Stalin would rather be opposed by words than by tanks and armies. Between the two evils, he would choose the man who would advise less spending for defense and whose presence in the White House might divide intead of unite countries of the West. Stalin's choice would be the candidate who would tend to withdraw from the burdens of a vigorous foreign policy, provided that one of the candidates would be that kind of president. It is almost tragically paradoxical that Stalin's moves on the international chessboard can make Americans vote the way he desires, even though his choice would inevitably be the worse one for the American people.

The Korean truce negotiations would be Stalin's most convenient tool in the coming election. His agent Malik first suggested them--over a year ago. If a quick truce had been arranged, Truman's foreign policy would have scored a tremendous victory. Campaigning on a Peace and Prosperity platform, Truman could be very hard to beat. But Harry Truman, for all his vices, is not Stalin's kind of President. So Stalin has let the truce talks bog down. The Korean casualties continue to trickle in, causing increasing impatience with Truman's foreign policy--impatience mixed with disillusionment, since what seemed at first a quick war has dragged on to exasperation. If the Democrats are to salvage any credit out of a truce, it will have to be negotiated soon.

Stalin, however, could easily prolong the talks into November, and then renew the fighting in time to insure the election of his choice. The only way Stalin's game can be thwarted, of course, is if he gets no choice, and if the only foreign policy question bandied by November's candates is not "What should our policy be?" but "Who can run our present policy better?"