POLITICAL NOTES: Straws in the Wind

¶ In San Francisco the youthful (ten years old) advertising firm of Guild, Bascom & Bonfigli fearlessly accepted a new account: for a 15% fee, G.B.& B. agreed to handle all of the Democratic Party’s advertising and pressagentry during the 1960 national campaign. The California firm’s acceptance marked the end of a long search by National Democratic Chairman Paul Butler, who had already been turned down by major ad agencies in Manhattan —because, so he said, they were fearful of offending big Republican customers.

¶ In Washington the word seeped out that Speaker Sam Rayburn, permanent chairman of the last three Democratic National Conventions, will not accept that honorific spot again at next July’s convention in Los Angeles. The chairman, Mister Sam feels, should be conspicuously neutral, and Rayburn’s own all-out support of Fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson’s presidential ambitions rules him out.

¶ Although the polls show that a Republican, Vice President Richard Nixon, is running miles ahead of any other presidential candidate of either party as the present choice of the voters, the Republicans are just as emphatically the minority party in the U.S. In a sampled nose count last week, the Gallup poll found that 56.2 million voters prefer the Democratic Party, 37.6 million like the Republicans, and 8.5 million are still undecided.

¶ Massachusetts’ John Kennedy and Missouri’s Stuart Symington, the Democratic Party’s two hottest presidential hopefuls, joined a group whose policies and pronouncements are generally somewhat to the port side of their own: the ultra-liberal Democratic Advisory Council. The two new members make D.A.C. participation almost unanimous for presidential aspirants. Among the other members: Adlai Stevenson and Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey, California’s Governor Edmund (“Pat”) Brown and Michigan’s Governor G. Mennen (“Soapy”) Williams. Conspicuously absent: Senator Lyndon Johnson, the Texas entry, who has refused D.A.C. membership and, with other conservative Democrats, frowns on its activities.