Peninsula Enterprise

Can a politician be wholly sincere?

Cynics have always answered that academic question with a loud and rancorous "No" but idealists, prove to adopt a more charitable point of view, have pointed to Borah, the magnificent, as a living proof that sincerity and politics are not incompatible. Here, they pointed out, was a man who said and did as his conscience dictated. let the chips fall where they may-a man who brooked no control by party caucuses or presidential pap; who went his own way, leaving his party to follow or not as it saw fit.

The cynical might counter in vain with the fact that Borah had never permitted his independence to take him out of the party fold, as witnessed by his refusal to bolt with Roosevelt or La Follette. That proved nothing in the view of idealists. Borah was a partisan, they would cheerfully grant, hampered possibly by his deep reverence for the traditions of the Republican party. but notwithstanding his dependable loyalty to party, when it come to a show-down he was that rara avis. a thoroughly conscientious statesman who would rather be right than be President.

But Borah's recent "buckets of blood" speech and subsequent developments must cause some of his most ardent admirers if they are not totally lost to logic, to wonder if he would really rather be right than be President. There is the possibility that ambition and the realization that it is 1928 or never have tempered slightly Borah's adamant devotion to principles regardless of penalties. It is painful to have to say so, but Borah looks just now more like a demagogue than a high-minded, fearless patriot.

Though willing to wade through blood for the preservation of the Eighteenth Amendment, Senator Borah is not willing to wade out of the Republican party long enough to join with his Republican colleague, Senator Norris, in a campaign for the Democratic candidate for United States Senator in Pennsylvania, Mr. Wilson who is a dry as against Vare, the wet Republican, whose $800,000.00 primary expenditures are a national scandal. Borah's passionate devotion to the Constitution-especially the Eighteenth Amendment-does not impel him to advocate the election of a clean Democrat as against a besmirched Republican any more than his devotion to progressive policies impelled him to support Roosevelt as against Taft or La Follette as against Coolidge.

Senator Borah, it seems. is a Republican first and a prohibitionist a constitutionalist and a wader through blood guite a distance afterward. But while, in his estimation. no Republican can possibly be quite as bad for the country as a Democrat. Borah takes considerable delight in haianguing Southern audiences on the impeccability of the Eighteenth Amendment. No doubt the Senator hopes for a break-up of the Solid South in the event that the Democratic National Convention nominates a wet, and is doing his bit to help along that delectable event. That is legitimate enough, and nobody can criticise him for taking advantage of any opportunity to promote his own political fortunes at the expense of Democracy.

But when Borah unlooses the vials of his wrath against nullification of the Eighteenth Amendment, prefaced with a carefully composed justification of the nullification of other amendments. which everybody knows have been nullified in the South for more than a generation. one is justified in questioning the Senator's sincerity. If "nullification is the slinking. silent, cowardly sapping of the foundations of all order, all dignity, all government," as Borah contends, he is to be commended for denouncing it in strong language. But he cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. He cannot anathematize nullification of one amendment and praise nullification of others, as he has been doing, without subjecting himself to the charge of insincerity and demagoguery. However, there is to be said in his apology this much: that he has ample precedent for his inconsistency in the attitude of many Southern politicians, from whom indeed he may be said to have obtained his cue.