Republicans: Anchors Aweigh

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By and large, Reagan has borne out Rockefeller's prediction. "I campaigned in the belief that the people are the best custodians of their own affairs," Reagan said last week on William F. Buckley's TV show, Firing Line. But he has learned quickly that it is not easy for the state to return custody of many affairs. As a result, he was forced to levy the biggest one-shot tax increase in the history of any state ($933 million) in order to balance the biggest state budget ever ($5.09 billion).

Both men would like to shift as much power—and tax money—as possible from Washington back to the states and localities. The difference is that Rea gan thinks that decentralization is altogether more feasible than does Rocky, who has had nine years as Governor in which to learn. During his tenure, Rockefeller has increased aid to secondary and elementary schools by 170%, tripled the size of the state university system, inaugurated a $1 billion program to end water pollution, pushed through a $1.50 minimum wage, and proposed a $2.5 billion program to modernize mass transportation. Though he was not entirely satisfied with the state's new constitution (see THE LAW), he endorsed it last week, a move that aligned the Governor with Bobby Kennedy and against practically everybody else, including other G.O.P. leaders, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party.

On Viet Nam, Rockefeller has shrewdly refused to stake out an explicit position. All along, he has expressed his support of the President but has never allowed himself to get involved in a debate on specific features of his policy. "I just don't have enough information to make a judgment on a thing which has to do with military tactics," he explains. When reports circulated recently that he was shifting to an anti-Johnson stance, he declared: "The President needs the support of the American people in the quest for an honorable peace." Rocky has thus hewed precisely to the course that Scammon, mixing metaphors, thinks Republican candidates should follow: "They should sit still, and if there is this wave of discontent, let the apple fall into their laps." Reagan, by contrast, is outspokenly in favor of an intensification of the U.S. war effort.

Par for the Course. Both men, of course, protest that they are not candidates. Last week Rockefeller wrote to groups in New Hampshire and New York asking them to end their efforts to draft him lest they prove "divisive and destructive" to the party. "I just don't have the ambition or the need or inner drive—or whatever the word is— to get in again," he has said. But it was once said of Thomas E. Dewey that "the only cure for presidentitis is embalming fluid," and Rocky has been waging a noncampaign that will leave him in a strong position if Romney's bid fails. Nelson did not appear conspicuously unhappy when supporters unfurled a Rocky-for-President banner during a G.O.P. meeting in Long Island last week. Nor does Reagan's professed noncandidacy jibe with his heavy speaking schedule in key primary states and his decision to become California's favorite son. "If the Republican Party came beating on my door," he admits, "I wouldn't say, 'Get lost, fellows.''