Getting Warmer

While the presidential campaign purred smoothly along, some of the local races were hotting up. Last week's hottest:

Connecticut. In a Republican year in a normally Republican state, a Republican governor should have little trouble getting reelected. The news from Connecticut was that Governor James C. Shannon, who succeeded to the office last March on the death of Governor James L. McConaughy, was getting a run for his money. The man who was doing it was ex-OPAdministrator Chester Bowles, who was crisscrossing the state, dropping in at the county fairs (sometimes joining in the softball games), and appearing three times a week on a radio program on which he invited voters to send him all their personal complaints. He hammered away at inflation, proposed a "voluntary" price-control plan. Governor Shannon still figured to win. Chester Bowles's ambition was to pile up a vote impressive enough to give him a share in taking over the receivership of the Democratic Party.

Illinois. There was little doubt that arch-isolationist Senator "Curly" Brooks would easily defeat the Democrats' leftish Paul Douglas, who ignored the party regulars, doggedly waged a futile one-man campaign from his station-wagon jeep. But the Republicans' handsome playboy, Governor Dwight Green, was facing real opposition from political amateur Adlai Stevenson (TIME, March 8).Backed by the nominally independent (but actually pro-Republican) Chicago Daily News, with the full support of other papers as far away as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Candidate Stevenson was hitting hard at graft, shakedowns and kickbacks in the state administration. Cried the News: "The Green administration . . . nourishes a swarm of grafters, chiselers and racketeers who grow bolder every year." Even if Pete Green rode into a third term on the Republican tide, socialite Lawyer-Diplomat Stevenson was learning some lessons for the future in the rough & tumble of Illinois politics. Said Stevenson: "If it's true that politics is the art of compromise, I've had a good start; my mother was a Republican and a Unitarian, my father was a Democrat and a Presbyterian. I ended up in his party and her church."

Ohio. If popular ex-Governor Frank Lausche returns to the Executive Mansion, Republican Governor Tom Herbert will have only himself to blame. Practical John Bricker had been shrewd enough to separate the state and national ballots when he was running for governor in 1940, thus avoiding burial in the Roosevelt landslide. But bumbling Tom Herbert had refused to ask the legislature to unite them again last summer to take advantage of Tom Dewey's pulling power. Plainly bored by Herbert's long-winded campaigning, many a Republican was listening to the impromptu, Lincoln-quoting speeches of Democrat Lausche, who had whipped the whole state machine to win the nomination, now was playing a lone hand with little mention of the rest of his ticket. His chances on Election day depended on the strength of an increasingly common curbstone comment: "I vote Republican but I'm going to cut over for Lausche."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.