Minnesota: Down with Youth

Karl Fritjof Rolvaag is balding, jowly and dumpy, looks at least a decade older than his 53 years, and in public wears the bemused air of a Norwegian farmer lost in the big city. In his first term as Governor of Minne sota, Rolvaag seemed so ineffectual that an opinion poll last February gave him the unqualified approval of only 9% of the voters. In June he was summarily rejected even by his own Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which chose Lieut. Governor A. M. ("Sandy") Keith, 37, as its gubernatorial candidate. Last week, nonetheless, Rolvaag won the D.F.L. nomination for another term by a landslide.

In large measure the upset reflected Rolvaag's ability to communicate his middle-aged sense of outrage at being dumped by the party. Challenging Keith to a primary fight, he crisscrossed the state, protesting that he was being euchred out of the Statehouse by a young man's ambition. "Let the people decide," he demanded; and last week they did, giving Rolvaag 315,734 votes to Keith's 146,926. Hubert Humphrey, a founding member of D.F.L. who backed Keith after the June conclave, hustled to knit the party together for November, when Rolvaag's Republican opponent will be Attorney Harold Le Vander, a political neophyte who has never run for statewide office before.