Hot on the Campaign Trail

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figures of U.S. industry as compared with those of other industrial nations. The U.S., he says, is discouraging trade and capital formation, while other countries are doing the opposite. That is an idea whose time has come, at least among the experts: even many liberal economists now believe that Government regulation should be eased and tax policies changed in order to stimulate investment.

Connally denies that his strong pro-business stance makes him a mere wagon master for corporate America. Says he: "Corporations can be monitored. They can be audited. But right now they're so scared of Government they don't dare stick their heads out. The idea that I would be a toady for Big Business, that I would let myself be exploited, that I would use Government to help corporations, is another of those myths. Hell, if I wanted to help myself, I'd denounce Big Business."

Connally's support of Big Business is not balanced, critics charge, by compassion for the workers and the poor. Symbolic, they say, was his confrontation with farm workers who were on a 64-day, 468-mile march to Austin in the summer of 1966 to seek a $1.25 minimum wage. Governor Connally drove out to them in his limousine to tell them in person that he was absolutely opposed to their demands and would not meet them in his office. Nevertheless, more than 6,000 marchers did converge on Austin on Labor Day, and Connally was out of town. Says San Antonio Congressman Henry Gonzalez: "I don't think he has the temperament to care about little people, not the way Lyndon Johnson did." Former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who testified as a character witness for Connally at his milk trial, wrote in her memoirs that she remembers how she was standing on a platform with him when word came of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death and the Governor said, "Those who live by the sword die by the sword."

Some conservatives, too, have their doubts about Connally's concept of the roles of Government and business. They view him as a corporate statist with proclivities toward Big Government, one who would enhance federal power along with business interests. When Connally met with a group of new-right leaders in a converted garage near the Capitol this summer, they grilled him on this point and also about his support of the Equal Rights Amendment and his refusal to support an antiabortion amendment. Connally answered the questions as bluntly as they were delivered, defending his positions.

Despite the doubts of the ideologists of the new right, most of whom are al ready committed to Reagan or Congress man Philip Crane, Connally's positions are generally conservative. He favors the SALT II treaty only if considerable new money is allocated for cruise missiles and other weapons, advocates a federal tax cut of $50 billion to $100 billion, opposes national health insurance, pushes strongly for nuclear power and the loosening of pollution laws to allow more use of coal, favors deregulation of oil with a provision that profits be plowed back to in crease production, and opposes gun control. His coup in luring right-wing Fund Raiser Richard Viguerie away from the Crane campaign has been important not so much for the money Viguerie might bring in as for the alliance Viguerie has with conservatives.

Some say the reason Connally so enjoys "deep rugs and rich