George Romney

"I was afraid you weren't going to ask me that," replied Governor George Romney to the inevitable question at the Washington dinner he was addressing. Romney may have been half-joking, but only half: his Presidential stock has gone down considerably in the past year. Only last spring his name was invariably mentioned after Rockefeller and Goldwater and before Scranton; now he has difficulty making the Top Five.

Romney's main liability is that he hasn't made a roaring success of being Michigan's first Republican governor in fifteen years. Most of his proposals failed to get through the Legislature, where they were opposed both by Democrats and by the outstate, ultra-conservative Republicans who have dominated both houses. Michigan, which Republicans often call labor-dominated, still does not have a minimum wage law, although Romney has again promised one for this year. Romney's one attempt to assert state over federal power ended when the state Attorney-General, a Democrat, ruled it unconstitutional; thus the state takes no advantage of federal aid to dependent children of the unemployed.

Romney's Presidential stock feel fastest, however, when the Legislature rejected his tax program. The governor had proposed an income tax, lower corporation taxes, and the removal of the four per cent sales tax on food and drugs--virtually the same program his predecessor, John B. Swainson, had advanced a year before. If anything, Romney had worse luck than Swainson in the Legislature. At one point, Swainson had a majority of the state Senate supporting his bill, when suddenly six moderate Republicans decided at once that each of the other five was going to change his vote, and the bill was defeated. Romney never even got this kind of majority. He ended up gaining few votes from either Democrats or outstate Republicans, and his tax program was defeated.

Romney still retains some of the charisma that shone on the cover of Time magazine in his more cocksure days; he runs ahead of Governor Scranton, for instance, in a poll of Republican rank-and-file. However, he has never actively sought the Party's Presidential nomination for 1964, and he has no large organization working for him. Besides, party professionals, who now place him far down the list, have never liked him much anyhow; it is said that they feel he is too independent. But this does not explain much, for while he is certainly not allied with the leaders of the Michigan Republican Party--who are largely outstate legislators--he might fit nicely into the national G.O.P. picture.

What is probably more objectionable to professional politicians is his lack of vote-getting ability, Admittedly, Romney is Michigan's first Republican governor since "Soapy" Williams won the first of his six terms in 1948. But Michigan has given Democrats other than Williams consistent majorities only since 1954, and their pluralities have seldom been large--again Williams is the exception. In this light, Romney's victory over Swainson by 80,000 votes in 1962 pales beside Scranton's 480,000 margin and Rockefeller's 520,000.

Romney's ability to win votes seems to have declined since November, 1962. The new state constitution, which was largely his work, passed a state-wide referendum by only seven thousand votes out of two million cast; the Democrats, who opposed the document, might have won the election if they had not overestimated Romney's strength and spent very little time and money on it.

The failure of Romney's tax program probably cost him more votes. A poll taken for ex-Governor Swainson surprisingly showed Swainson ahead of Romney, 50.1 per cent to 49.5 in the gubernatorial contest. Swainson, however, has ruled himself out of November's race for reasons of health, and the likely winner of the Democratic nomination is Neil Staebler, now Congressman-at-Large and the Democratic State Chairman who presided over Williams's victories. Staebler won his '62 race--his first--by 110,000 votes, and although he is not as well-known as Swainson, he does not have the close identification with labor unions that hurt Swainson in many voters' eyes.

It appears that Romney should have little trouble in evading the Republican Presidential nomination; his greatest difficulty in 1964 will be getting re-elected Governor of Michigan.