Political Notes: Trying Again

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In other political developments last week:

≫ Governor Harold E. Hughes of Iowa, who rose from a truck-driver's cab and the captivity of alcoholism to become a successful (and abstemious) Democrat in a traditionally Republican state, announced that he will seek a third two-year term rather than try to unseat Republican U.S. Senator Jack

Miller. Hughes, 43, ran ahead of Miller 3 to 1 in a public-opinion poll this fall. He wants to stay in Des Moines a while longer, however, to see through proposed amendments to the state constitution that would reapportion the legislature and reorganize the state government.

≫ Winthrop Rockefeller, 53, the Arkansas cattle breeder, decided to try again for the same kind of job his brother Nelson has back in New York.

With his wife on one arm and $1,500 in a plastic bag under the other, he plunked down the electoral filing fee in Little Rock nearly four months before the legal deadline. Winthrop is bound and determined that the boy from Greazy Creek, Governor Orval Faubus, will never again defeat him the way he did in the 1964 gubernatorial race. Faubus has not said whether he will try for a seventh term, but his friends have a feeling that he is the only Democrat in the state who can keep Republican Rockefeller down on the farm.

≫ Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, 73, one of the most liberal of Democrats and a onetime economics professor at the University of Chicago, set out last week to try to teach a former student a postgraduate lesson, this time in political science. The tall, shambling Marine Corps veteran of Peleliu and Okinawa announced that he would run for a fourth term "if the Democratic Party wants me." There was little doubt that it would. His only announced Republican rival is Charles Percy, 46, the Bell & Howell board chairman who failed in a try for the governorship in 1964. Douglas was Percy's economics professor in 1938, a fact that gives him an elder statesman's image but also accentuates what is likely to be a main campaign issue: youth v. age.