National Affairs: THE DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS In 1960 Their Big Year

IN the early politicking toward the 1960 Democratic National Convention, the Democratic Party's 35 Governors have been rated more as pawns than potential kingmakers. This campaign, said the pundits, belonged either to twice-defeated Adlai Stevenson or to one of four U.S. Senators: Massachusetts' Jack Kennedy, Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey, Missouri's Stuart Symington or Texas' Lyndon Johnson. But as candidates and their hardheaded professionals get down to counting delegates, they will find the Governors in command of most delegations fully aware of their separate and collective bargaining power and—in some cases —firm believers that a Governor belongs somewhere on the ticket.

Still at work in the Governors' favor is the same old chemistry that has kept either party from nominating a U.S. Senator since Republicans put up Ohio's Warren Gamaliel Harding for President in 1920. Senators make enemies in their votes on controversial issues, and this year's crop is no exception (e.g., the Democratic vote against confirmation of Lewis Strauss as Commerce Secretary). Moreover, presidential candidates in the Senate are having a great deal of trouble keeping their luster in the current squabble over Democratic Party policy (see The Congress) and are suffering from overexposure to the voters. Aspiring Governors cannot claim to influence foreign policy, but they have not got onto the national stage enough to be boring; most of them have submitted balanced budgets, and all have tested their executive mettle in dealing with their legislatures.

Those who run big states will be the strong men at Los Angeles, and the better they run them the better they will look:

California's Edmund Gerald Brown, 54, laid his political prestige on the line with a sheaf of legislative proposals, and came through with banners waving. He pushed through a state FEPC, abolished the oddball cross-filing system for party primaries, organized down-to-smokestack antismog attack, raised taxes enough to trim a threatened $201 million deficit to $5,000,000, launched a long-dreamed-of $2 billion waterway program to deliver Northern California's water to Southern California's arid, sunny region (TIME, June 29). He gained effective control of a divided party, has cagily chaperoned visiting would-be nominees, giving none a chance to sneak around his favorite-son "off-limits" sign.

Connecticut's Abraham A. Ribicoff, 49, onetime police-court judge and Congressman (1949-53), has gained impressive stature in his five years in office, pushed a broad reform program through the now Democratic legislature. He got a balanced budget (but slid from a 1957 surplus of $32.3 million to a deficit this year of $10.5 million), court reform, a tough law on automatic suspension for convicted speeders, a tourist-luring ad campaign, abolition of the 300-year-old county-government system. A Jew, he has since 1956 gone into other states—last week into California—as an all-out backer of Roman Catholic Jack Kennedy.