Four hundred dollar's worth of Harvard's Coolidge Prize winners couldn't do it. Neither could a picked Princeton debate team, even with the moral encouragement of an audience of Harvard Club economic royalists. Nor could a Yale delegation. All three teams attacking the New Deal in Friday's H--Y--P debates failed to bring home even a piece of the bacon.

The anti-New Deal arguments spanned a wide field, ranging from pump-priming to armaments. Yet of all the weapons flourished, none managed to pierce the New Deal hide very deeply. The judges in each of the capital-cities of the Big Three were agreed: the New Deal's opponents had no case. Each decision was awarded to the team which advocated the re-election of the New Deal in 1940.

No one suggests that this proves anything conclusively. Personalities and foreign policy were barred from discussion. The debaters upholding the administration may have been far and away better than their opponents. The judges were undoubtedly not typical American voters.

Yet withal, the triple triumph of the New Deal in these debates is comment-worthy. For it demonstrates that opponents of the present administration will have a hard time marshalling arguments against it. Relief, Recovery, and Reform represent specific achievements of the Roosevelt regime which can not easily or logically be refuted.

Perhaps this explains why Republican attacks on the New Deal have been largely confined to fancy verbiage. The platitudes of Tom Dewey, the semantical flourishes of Glenn Frank, Vandenburg's promise of "social-mindedness but not socialism"--may they not be an admission by the anti-administration forces that on logical grounds they are licked? And that Republican hopes must rest on their chances to obscure New Deal accomplishments in a cloud of oratorical and emotional overtones?