National Reports: How the Garden State Chooses Governor:
RESNICK, ROBERT H.
NATIONAL REPORTS How the Garden State Chooses a Governor By Robert H. Resnick New Jersey is a politician's dream and a voter's nightmare. This week its citizens will choose Republican and...
...By nominating Hughes, the Democrats impaired their chances for victory...
...his friendship with Eisenhower, labor and minority groups...
...and the need for a Governor who can keep industry in the state and bring in new factories to alleviate unemployment...
...Working quietly, Jones lined up the all-important support of 15 of the state's 21 county chairmen...
...Jones, a rapid-fire speaker who is articulate and well-informed on state problems, has been emphasizing different issues in his well-attended campaign talks: commuter transportation, taxes and where to build a proposed new jet airport...
...Mitchell was persuaded to seek the Governorship by U.S...
...Thus, despite the urgings of national leaders that they run the best available candidates, the local politicians of both parties have decided to take calculated risks to retain personal control of their organizations...
...Meyner envisaged an easy victory for the popular young junior Senator—along with an empty Senate seat to be filled by an ex-governor who has lost his taste for a small-town law practice...
...But Jones has most of the party workers, the doorbell ringers who get out the minimum party vote —and that's what counts in a primary where only an estimated 350400,000 of the state's 2.8 million registered voters will cast ballots...
...His political principles were flexible enough last year to enable him to remain neutral in the bitter primary fight between Gase and arch-conservative Robert Morris, former counsel to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee...
...Hughes backed down and has kept out of controversy since, biding his time until his opponent is known...
...Party leaders then passed over some other familiar figures and handed the nomination to Richard J. Hughes, an amiable, attractive, completely unknown former judge, who had been out of public life for more than a decade...
...To overcome this disadvantage...
...This week its citizens will choose Republican and Democratic candidates for Governor...
...Mitchell has been stressing the importance of coming to the polls to nominate the man most likely to win in November...
...Jones rose to leadership on the county and state level after helping in a general housecleaning when a series of petty scandals rocked the GOP in 1952-53...
...Mitchell has had to content himself with the backing of three county chairmen, the press, most of the party's financial contributors and four of New Jersey's eight GOP Congressmen...
...Next month many of its leading cities will hold municipal elections...
...He also can claim sponsorship of a number of progressive and popular measures, including a bill now pending in the Legislature that would ban racial discrimination in the sale and renting of private homes...
...When the President heard at his last Cabinet meeting that the Labor Secretary would enter the Garden State race, he gave him a $100 campaign contribution and promised more help later...
...It features James P. Mitchell, for seven years President Eisenhower's Secretary of Labor, and State Senators Walter H. Jones and Wayne Dumont Jr...
...So great is Mitchell's personal popularity with all classes of citizens—including business and labor leaders—that Washington commentators such as Joseph Alsop and Roscoe Drummond have assumed his nomination and election as a matter of course...
...He has only token opposition in the primary...
...Before the dust settles the Legislature will meet and campaigning will start for the April 1962 primaries...
...But state leaders were not willing to accommodate the Governor when he suggested they run U.S...
...In no other state are the electors so frequently summoned to the polls...
...However the state party leaders, long wary of the liberal Case, decided to back Walter H. Jones, majority leader of the State Senate and head of a powerful Republican county organization...
...Caught between his two opponents, Dumont was left with little support and is expected to run third...
...It is an unequal fight: Mitchell has money and the techniques of modern political campaigning — billboards, spot announcements on television and radio, mailings and telephone calls...
...By not nominating Mitchell without opposition, the GOP did the same thing...
...Even if Mitchell wins the primary, his reputation has already been tarnished by an unpleasant campaign in which his basic competence and intelligence were questioned by opponents within his own party...
...Then, with the help of a group of young, clean-cut and shrewd politicians, he rescued his party from the grip of the malodorous Jersey City machine and made it the dominant political organ in New Jersey...
...Judging by the small crowds and their apparent indifference, his campaign has fallen short of its mark...
...Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr...
...The national chairman of the losing party will have the right to cry himself to sleep the night of November 7. For no matter who is defeated, it need never have happened...
...Robert H. Resnick is a former Associated Press newsman in New Jersey...
...This week's only real contest is on the GOP side...
...Senator Clifford P. Case, the GOP's top votegetter in New Jersey...
...The Republican opportunity in New Jersey arose earlier this year when the Democrats showed signs of strain in choosing a candidate to succeed their popular Governor, Robert B. Meyner...
...Hughes created the only stir in the campaign so far when, in a speech to the State Federation of Women's Clubs, he said Mitchell was "feeding off the rotted carcass of Eisenhower Republicanism...
...All the Democrats had to do to assure themselves of four more years in the State House was agree on one of a number of well-known and attractive persons as a candidate...
...But unless there is an upset Tuesday, Mitchell will lose and the Republican party's opportunity to get off to a fast start on the road to national political recovery will suffer...
...Meyner, before 1953 an unknown lawyer from a small town on the Delaware river, toppled an entrenched Republican organization with the aid of the same scandals that played a role in Jones' career...
...This was a little too much to take right after lunch and the normally genteel women vociferously expressed their disapproval...
...Mitchell was one of those specifically asked by the outgoing President—along with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and Secretary of Defense Thomas S. Gates Jr., among others—to remain active in GOP politics during the anticipated eight dark years of the New Frontier...
...In November New Jersey, accompanied only by Virginia, will elect a chief executive...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 16
