Oklahoma: Lament of the Senior Sooner

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Every successful Senator and Representative faces the Potomac paradox: seniority breeds power and prestige, but its responsibilities can also alienate an incumbent from the voters back home.

So far this year, grass-roots revolts have shelved Senators Frank Lausche of Ohio and Thomas Kuchel of California. Now a similar syndrome threatens Oklahoma Senator Mike Monroney, 66, a 30-year Capitol Hill veteran and his state's senior member of Congress.

Six terms in the House and three in the Senate have made Monroney a fixture, but one not really plugged into the sockets of power. A populist liberal of impeccable reputation, Monroney has chosen to be an expert rather than a force. His efforts to reorganize Congress have largely gone by the board. He is chairman of the Senate's Post Of fice and Civil Service Committee and is known as "Mr. Aviation" because of his continued—and unheeded—warn ings about America's crowded sky. Intelligent and hardworking, he is the quiet antithesis of Oklahoma's flamboyant king of the Senate, the late Bob Kerr. Yet back in the Sooner State, it was Kerr who took the stump to save Monroney's 1962 re-election bid. Now Kerr is gone, and his legacy of federal largesse haunts Monroney, who gets little credit for the dams, defense installations and grants that he has helped to sprinkle around the state.

End of Hegemony. From the dry Western wheatfields has come a potent Republican challenger, former Governor Henry Bellmon, 46, a well-to-do Billings rancher who acts like a hayseed but in fact is the shrewdest political operator in the state. Bellmon built a vi able G.O.P. in Democratic Oklahoma, overcame a 4-to-l registration gap, and carried the state for Richard Nixon in 1960 and himself in 1962. A Marine veteran of Iwo Jima who does not drink, smoke or swear, he delighted the backwoods by scorning a "monkey suit" at his inauguration. As Oklahoma's first G.O.P. Governor, Bellmon proved so popular that in 1966 he was able to pull in a Republican successor, Governor Dewey Bartlett, a Princeton-educated, Roman Catholic Tulsan in a traditionally rural-oriented, Protestant state. Democratic hegemony has been shattered, and now Bellmon is after Monroney's Senate seat.

Neither sets the hustings afire. Bellmon runs as a folksy, somewhat hawkish conservative. Monroney cogently defends Administration policies on the war, farm problems, gun control and the cities, but in a colorless style that tends to tune out his audiences. While both men are uncommonly shy for politicians, Bellmon drives himself through a saturation-handshaking pace. His key tack is the charge that Monroney has lost touch with the red-dirt prairies and hills of home.