Camden Clee Vote Called Good Omen

Camden Courier-Post – February 10, 1938

Driscoll Says It Proves County is Republican If Candidates Are Right

The overwhelming vote Camden county gave Senator Lester H, Clee last November proves “beyond a doubt” that Camden county will support Republican candidates “when they are qualified to hold office,” Alfred E. Driscoll, Haddonfield commissioner, declared Tuesday.

Addressing members of the Twelfth Ward Republican Club, at 2709 Westfield Avenue, Driscoll said the vote for Clee “demonstrated conclusively that Camden county is Republican-minded.”

“If we offer candidates qualified for the offices they seek,” Driscoll said, “they will be elected. Voters quite rightly are thinking nowadays of a candidate’s qualification for office. If the candidate is the man or woman for the job, the people will elect him.

“There was a time when a one-man endorsement of a candidate was all that was necessary. That day is gone and with it went one-man domination of the Republican party in Camden county. The so-called political leaders who boast they carry their districts ‘in the bag’ are equally passe.

“The Republican party In Camden county is definitely on its way to the greatest strength it ever had. The ‘come-back’, if you want to call it that, was made because our people are thinking as they vote.”

Driscoll also expressed the opinion that anytime a common enemy threatens the United States, its people as a nation will toss overboard any “isms” they may have prescribed to and rush to the defense of the country.

“The freedom and liberty guaranteed by our Constitution,” he said, “are too firmly implanted to be set aside. There is a lot of talk about ‘communism’ and ‘fascism’ but if either of them ever become a real threat, the vast majority of our citizens will rise up to defeat them.”