Michigan: The New Generation

No Michigan politician knows how to play the underdog better than Jerome Cavanagh, who as an obscure young lawyer in 1961 overcame opposition from both business and labor to become mayor of Detroit. “I won then,” he said last week, “and I can win now.” Thus Cavanagh, 37, announced that he would challenge one of the state’s best-known Democrats, six-term former Governor G. Mennen Williams, 55, for the party’s nomination as its U.S. Senate candidate in next August’s primary.

Wealthy Soapy Williams, who resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs to make the race, already has the support of the state’s powerful labor leaders and the Democratic machine. Yet no one is discounting the popular, dynamic Jerry Cavanagh-least of all Cavanagh, who has taken his own polls, believes that Williams’ organization support may not help him win younger voters.

Asking Michiganders to reject “old sentiments and past alliances,” Cavanagh declared: “There is a new generation of political leadership. New men and new ideas are needed urgently to meet the problems of the new decade.”