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true that politicans...you know, if he had won, it would have been very difficult for him to have any relations with her.
Well, Albert and I spent the late summer in Lake Forest and we listened to Willkie's campaign speeches and suddenly I realized that my hero wasn't speaking in the energetic and lively tone that I thought he spoke in when I first was taken with him. My chief worry was that I could see that Franklin Roosevelt was saying constantly what he was going to do for people, answering the thing that all people want to know for politicians; how does he stand on things that affect my life? And Willkie was talking about theoretical cuts in taxes and fiscal matters which people mostly couldn't understand and nothing about what he was going to do for them, and I sensed that we were in a disaster of some kind.
I suppose this is the sort of thing Mr. Lasker was thinking about, that a man not schooled in politics wasn't able to relate to people.
Yes, but he also felt that an important businessman who represented the business community could never cope with Roosevelt, and he was right. The miracle was that Willkie was nominated at all, and he was nominated really as a result of a stalemate between Dewey and Taft, as you know.
I suppose you have something of its counterpart in British politics today, with Sir Alec leading the Conservative Party, an
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