Ever since the rejuvenated donkey kicked the G.O.P. white elephant back to the sunny fields of California, Republican leaders have been sitting in their overstuffed chairs taking pot shots at the administration. Their criticism has run the gamut from intelligent analysis of Roosevelt's budgetary policy to the point of suspecting that Rex Tugwell's pearly teeth are a fabrication.

They seem to have forgotten their true function as an opposition party. Instead, they have perched like vultures in the trees of Lafayette Park waiting for the victim to choke on alphabet soup.

As yet, the Republicans have made no attempt to force the administration to define its general policies as a basis on which to formulate definite alternative issues. Their opposition has been as sterile as the Sahara desert. Devoting all their attention to discrediting Rooseveltian ideas, they have given the public no intimation of the program they would follow if elected to office. As in 1932, so in 1936, recovery will be the fundamental issue. The Republicans must offer a platform which, while conservative, yet offers to the common people a tangible hope for better times. They must fight the vast grants of federal funds with some program which will appeal to the hearts and purses of that vast populace who listen to the gospels of such demagogues as the late Huey Long, and the ever present Father Coughlin.