Word: barkleys
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Whenever he walked outside, Democrats crowded around him. All of them -including his five leading rivals-were glad to see him, and couldn't help showing it. They felt that he was somehow on their side. Alben Barkley was really on everybody's side: he was Mr. Democrat, the personification of a kind of comradeship that binds together the dissident bundles in the Democratic Party. There was a half-truth, but a deep half-truth, in the campaign placard: "North, South, East, West, all agree Barkley best." All would have agreed, at that point, that Barkley was second...
...that agreement rested Barkley's slim hope for the nomination. It was not good enough. Too many of the party leaders knew that the Democrats are facing the fight of a generation against the G.O.P. ticket of Eisenhower and Nixon...
...Pain. Barkley's candidacy and withdrawal will not damage the widespread affection in which he is held. His age has only mellowed the robust geniality that has always been his political stock in trade. He combines a strong Methodist sense of personal honesty, loyalty and principles with a belief that U.S. politics is a process of compromise rather than an instrument of doctrinaire philosophy or a weapon of personal ambition. And he discovered early in the game that a sense of humor could ease the process for everybody, including Alben Barkley...
...Alben gets his way," said a fellow Kentuckian, "but he does it so you never feel it hurt." In 1949, while Barkley was presiding over the Senate, he ruled against his Southern friends in an attempt to cut off a Southern filibuster. But he lost not a friend thereby. He set the tone by reaching for one of his ageless stories. "I feel," he said, "somewhat like the man who was being ridden out of town on a rail. Someone asked him how he liked it, and he said that if it were not for the honor of the thing...
Another Kentuckian describes Barkley as "an extreme extrovert-but one with a feeling for what the other fellow is thinking." Translated into political terms, this means that he has an uninhibited affection for people, even strangers, and shows it when they put personal demands on his life. Right after his wedding in 1949, he overheard his bride say: "Will someone fix my jacket before I go out and face that mob?" Said the bridegroom: "Why, that's no mob out there, my dear, that's the American people." When the American people began to make sightseeing detours through...