The Citizen's Candidate

(See Cover)

The father of the compact car got up and dressed at 6 a.m. Usually he takes a prebreakfast jog around the grounds of suburban Detroit's Bloomfield Hills Country Club, which is adjacent to his $150,000 contemporary home. At the very least, he plays a fast game of "compact golf"—six holes, three balls. But on this particular morning, he and his wife Lenore hurried over to the polling place—to vote for George Wilcken Romney, 55, Republican candidate for Governor of Michigan. Many a politician might then have rewarded himself with a well-deserved rest on the day of days. But not Romney, a man of depthless energy and evangelical fervor about everything that engages his interest. On Election Day 1962, Romney went out campaigning.

He flew to Lansing to help dramatize the G.O.P. get-out-the-vote drive. There he baby-sat for a mother who could not otherwise leave her three children to go out and vote. (She went straight Republican.) Then he flew to Bay City, marched up and down Washington Avenue, stopped off at a garment factory to shake the hands of the women workers, got back into his plane to head for a round of electioneering in Port Huron. In that city, he slid behind the wheel of a new Rambler and chauffeured a 75-year-old spinster to the polls. On the way, Salesman Romney asked his passenger if she had ever before been in a Rambler. "No," said she with a twinkle, "but I've done quite a bit of rambling in my life."

Keeping Company. She voted for Romney. So did 1,419,000 other Michigan voters—a sizable segment of whom had felt the grip of the man's hand, seen the lean, jut-jawed face and the fire in the light hazel eyes—and heard his message about citizens' participation in government. All together, those voters, and those personal qualities, helped Romney defeat Governor John B. Swainson by some 78,500 votes—thereby ending a 14-year Democratic dynasty in Michigan.

No sooner was the outcome known than Romney became a major Republican presidential possibility for 1964. Come what may, he will be a force in national G.O.P. politics for at least the next few years. In that sense, he finds himself in the company of two other big Republican winners:

∙ Pennsylvania's Representative William Scranton. 45, who was elected Governor over Philadelphia's former Mayor Richardson Dilworth by 470,000 votes. Scranton (TIME cover. Oct. 19), who matched Dilworth insult for insult in one of the most savage campaigns in recent U.S. history, cut deeply into the Democratic fortress of Philadelphia, won ordinarily Democratic Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) by 52,000 votes. With a Republican legislature to help him, plus patronage powers that will give him control of 50,000 state jobs, Scranton awoke on the morning after Election Day as a Republican really to be reckoned with. So desperate is Pennsylvania's economic condition that Scranton can hardly help improving things. An admirer of New York's Governor Rockefeller, Scranton pooh-poohs all suggestions that he himself might seek the nomination. But it could happen.