National Affairs: THE DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS In 1960 Their Big Year

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Washington's Albert Dean Rosellini, 49, son of an immigrant Italian grocer, was a freewheeling Seattle criminal lawyer and 18-year state senator, won his four-year term in 1956. His overoptimism on tax estimates, plus the recession, ran up a $48 million deficit in his first biennium, which he dealt with in this year's legislature—Democratic in both houses by the largest majority since New Deal days—by pushing through tax boosts that set off a short-lived taxpayer revolt. In Protestant-majority Washington, Rosellini shivers at the fear of a Catholic presidential candidate calling attention to the Catholics already holding Washington's key jobs: Governor, speaker of the house, president of the senate, secretary of state, attorney general.

Colorado's Stephen L R. McNichols, 45, a cold-eyed, dollarwise, Western type who got most of his program t including model plans for aid to the aged, mental health and state highways) through the Democratic legislature. Although on the Democratic Advisory Council, he plumps mostly for such Western causes as reclamation projects, has much regard for Texan Lyndon Johnson's ideas. One of the West's able Catholics, he has upped his vice-presidential lightning rod, demands party attention to his region. Says he: "We have votes as well as political savvy."

Of all the Governors, California's Pat Brown now looms as the most important politically—because of his impressive record, his state's growing importance and the large number of delegates he will control. Once he seemed flattered to be discussed as a favorite son: now he not only takes seriously some talk of a vice-presidential nomination but listens to speculation about a presidential lightning bolt. And like most of the other seven Catholic Democratic Governors, Pat Brown has no interest at all in advancing the candidacy of front-running Catholic Jack Kennedy, since obviously two Catholics do not make a winning ticket.

With New York in Republican hands, it is California's Brown, Pennsylvania's Lawrence, New Jersey's Meyner, Michigan's Williams and the other big-delegation state leaders who can do much to set the trend at the start of the Los Angeles convention. And in the floor fighting that follows, they and their favorite sons could become the most sought-after Democratic Governors in many a convention year.