Republicans: Hypothesis Unbound

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The Best Deal. Given all the uncertainty, California's Ronald Reagan loomed as an alternate beneficiary of any breakdown in the Romney band- wagon. While Reagan remained preoccupied last week with the first major battle of his administration, the abrasive controversy over the firing of U.C. president Clark Kerr (see EDUCATION), former California G.O.P. Chairman Gaylord Parkinson was spreading the word at New Orleans that the Governor was now "holding the door open" for the presidential nomination. In recent weeks, Texas' Republican Senator John Tower and Florida's new G.O.P. Governor Claude Kirk Jr. have made separate pilgrimages to Sacramento, each of them agreeing to go to the 1968 convention as favorite-son candidates. Reagan made the same decision.

The favorite-son gambit, in fact, has caught on in almost every key state. Besides Reagan, Tower and Kirk, the likely list now includes Ohio's James Rhodes, Pennsylvania's Raymond Shafer, either Percy or Everett Dirksen in Illinois, Rockefeller or Jacob Javits in New York. Romney strategists, realizing that their candidate has to build first-ballot strength in the primaries, are planning intensive campaigns in four states: New Hampshire, Nebraska, Oregon and Wisconsin.

Democratic Granddaddy. Behind the maneuvering lay the fact that the G.O.P.'s presidential nomination has become a prize worth fighting for. By contrast with the gloomy 1965 meeting in Chicago that followed the Goldwater rout, the 1967 national committee gathering was turned on by the nerve-end feeling—right or wrong—that Lyndon Johnson can be beaten. The credit, in large part, goes to plain-talking, publicity-shy Ray Bliss, who took over as national G.O.P. chairman two years ago, rebuilt the demoralized party as a credible political force among rural Southerners, big-city Northerners and Negroes.

The most heartening thing about the G.O.P.'s presidential stirrings is that they are generally free of racist overtures. That there is a new Republican Party—as well as an incipient new South—was manifest in a speech to the New Orleans conclave by Tennessee's freshman G.O.P. Senator Howard Baker, Dirksen's son-in-law. "I'm a lot less concerned about what my Democratic granddaddy must think of me," declared Baker, "and a lot more concerned about what my grandchildren will think of me."