October 14, 1992|By Theo Lippman Jr.  This is the 52nd
presidential election.  The 38th came in 1936 after four years
of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's revolutionary New Deal with
its consolidation of power in the federal government.  His
Republican opponents put aside their own personal and
philosophical differences to unite behind Gov. Alf Landon, a
popular, winning, somewhat progressive Kansan.  Summing up the
party's mood, one Republican senator said at the national
convention that there was only one faction and it had only one
motto, ''Stop Roosevelt!''  FDR and the Democrats were equally
combative. The president boasted that ''the forces of
selfishness and of lust for power'' (read ''Republicans and big
businessmen'') had ''met their match'' in his first term and
would ''[meet] their master'' in his second.  Many analysts
thought the election would be close, but FDR won by the biggest
landslide in history to that point; in fact, his margins of
victory in the Electoral College and in the popular-vote