National Affairs: THE DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS In 1960 Their Big Year

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Iowa's Herschel Cellel Loveless, 48, shrewd two-termer (1956, '58 ) in a G.O.P. state, is a one-room-school graduate, onetime gandy-dancer boss, a tireless campaigner who talks over nobody's head ("I speak their language. If I want to say 'ain't,' I say 'ain't' "). Touted by admirers as a "tightfisted liberal." Loveless got elected campaigning against ''high-tax Republicans," used his veto to trim the sales tax (from 2½% to 2%), lucked into booming revenues from old taxes as recession-free Iowa expanded industrially. He held his own with the G.O.P. legislature, lured Democrats out of 18-year hibernation, proved his control over the state party by effortlessly knocking over Chairman Jake More.

Minnesota's Orville Freeman, 41, Hubert Humphrey's partner in building the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party into a vote-making concern, last year piled up a surplus-sized majority for his third two-year term, helped defeat Republican Senator Ed Thye. This year, in the state senate, Old Guard Republican forces retaliated by blocking Freeman's tax program in the regular session, held out through a special session, finally forced a compromise on their terms ½% boost in income-tax rates, no withholding) last weekend. For President, Freeman naturally has no choice except Hubert Humphrey.

Wisconsin's Gaylord Nelson, 43, this year took over an office that was comfortably occupied for 24 years by Republicans, eagerly wrapped into a single, 42-point legislative program the welfare proposals and tax changes he futilely backed for ten years as a minority state senator. He dropped this do-it-now package upon the Senate, which, still G.O.P.-controlled (20-13), let it lie largely unopened and unpassed. Looking to his own future, Nelson would like to avoid a bitter presidential primary fight in Wisconsin between Kennedy and Humphrey.

Some Governors who have neither power nor pivot possibilities can still operate on the basis of personality or freshness:

Kansas' George Docking, 55, is a budget-watching Lawrence banker. Like Iowa's Loveless, he won his first term in the Republican heartland (1956) by condemning a halfpenny G.O.P. sales-tax hike (2% to 2½%), won again on the same issue in 1958 to become the state's first two-term Democratic Governor. Of late he set Republicans guessing whether he will run next year for a third term or go after Andrew Schoeppel's Senate seat, also genially encouraged rumors that he might get a chance at the ticket's No. 2 spot.

Oklahoma's J. Howard Edmonson, at 33 youngest of the 49 Governors, called his biggest-ever state majority last year a "mandate" for reform, repealed state prohibition and set up a state-income-tax withholding system. But old hands in the legislature refused to be reformed out of business, slapped down such notions as reapportionment of the legislature, got mad enough to pose a threat to the Governor's traditional control over the state's convention delegation.