Man Behind the Desk

Nowhere in the U.S. did Republicans score greater 1962 election successes than in Ohio: Republican Auditor James A. Rhodes walloped Democratic Governor Mike Di Salle by 555,000 votes, one of the biggest gubernatorial majorities in the state's history; the G.O.P. also gained two seats in Congress, widened its margin in the lower house of the state legislature, won decisive control of the state senate. As always, the winning candidates posed for pictures and gave interviews. Yet almost all of them would readily have admitted that the man most responsible for the victory was State Chairman Ray Charles Bliss, 54, a "politician's politician" who avoids the limelight as though it were a death ray.

Nuts & Bolts Approach. Bliss's success can be measured by the contrast between November 1948 and November 1962. In 1948 Harry Truman carried Ohio, and the G.O.P. lost seven of the eight statewide offices that were at stake. With the party demoralized by defeat and torn by dissension, G.O.P. leaders asked Bliss, longtime chairman in Summit County (Akron), to take over as state chairman. Bliss was far from eager for the job: he had founded his own insurance agency only a few years before, and he wanted to retire from politics. He agreed to serve as chairman only after state party leaders promised to let him run things his own way.

His way is the practical, painstaking nuts-and-bolts approach that he had learned at the precinct, city and county levels. There are, he says, two kinds of state chairmen--the "road chairman," who goes around expounding his party's philosophy, and the "office chairman," who plans and executes practical programs of political action. Bliss is very much an office chairman. "I'm not going to waste my time making speeches," he says. "There's a million guys who can make a better speech than I can." He normally spends his working day, from 10 a.m. to about 1 a.m., seated in a red leather chair behind a big desk in the party headquarters in Columbus. At night, when the office is quiet, he pulls sheaves of public opinion surveys out of a desk drawer and pores over them, calculating percentages and searching for patterns and trends.

The key to election-day success, in the Bliss system, is a permanent party organization that keeps on working between elections. Issues come and go, elections are won and lost, but the organization, says Bliss, "must be a continuous thing." And the key to effective organization is getting a lot of people working enthusiastically at unglamorous precinct-level chores. One reason he avoids publicity, says Bliss, is that he does not want anybody to "get the idea that all I have to do is push a button and we've got the election won. Politics just doesn't work that way. Elections are won by thousands and thousands of people working together."

Costly Meddling. Upon taking over as state chairman, Bliss got a massive registration drive under way, traveled about the state instilling into local Republican groups his gospel of organized enthusiasm. Result: in 1950, despite an intense and well-financed drive by organized labor to defeat the architect of the Taft-Hartley Act, Senator Robert A. Taft won reelection by a smashing margin, and the G.O.P. gained four additional House seats.

Since 1950's dramatic reversal, Bliss and the Ohio G.O.P. have suffered only one important setback. In 1958 a group of politically myopic Ohio businessmen succeeded in getting a right-to-work referendum on the ballot despite Bliss's impassioned warnings that the move would prove to be political poison. Governor William O'Neill endorsed right-to-work and lost, along with Senator John Bricker and scores of other Republicans. Furious at the costly meddling by amateurs, Bliss called 135 leading Ohio Republicans to a meeting, gave them a three-hour lecture course in practical politics, and laid down an ultimatum: either leave political decisions up to the pros or find a new state chairman. When he finished, the audience broke into cheers. Firmly in charge Bliss began working toward 1960--when

Richard Nixon easily cornered Ohio and Republicans made substantial gains in congressional, state and local elections.

A Reawakening. After Kennedy won the presidency despite the loss of Ohio's electoral votes, the Republican National Committee appointed Bliss to head a task force to find out why the G.O.P. had fared so poorly in the cities--of 41 U.S. cities with a population of 300,000 or more, Nixon won a majority in only 14. The Bliss report put much of the blame on lackadaisical party organizations, urged a buildup of permanent local organizations with fulltime, paid staffs. In the 1962 elections, Republicans did much better in the cities. Pennsylvania's Governor-elect William Scranton got 43% of the votes in Philadelphia as against Nixon's 32% in 1960, and Michigan's Governor-elect George Romney won 33% in Detroit as against Nixon's 29%. In Bliss's own Ohio, Governor-elect Rhodes got 54.5% in Democratic Cleveland, which had given only 40% of its votes to Nixon.

As the party's most strikingly successful state chairman, Bliss stands high in G.O.P. national councils. He is national vice chairman of the party, head of the Midwest regional body of state chairmen. This week he and the other regional heads will meet with National Chairman William E. Miller to "pursue our organizational reawakening," as Miller put it.

Bliss is an obvious possibility to succeed Miller as national chairman some day. "I have not been interested in being national chairman up to now," says Bliss. "I reserve the right to change my mind." In the meantime, his job, he says, is "electing Republicans in Ohio." He has done so well at it that there are few major political offices in Ohio still held by Democrats, but the 1962 returns were barely counted before Bliss was back in his red leather chair making plans to elect even more Republicans in 1964.

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