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"Everybody is crazy about him," says a clubwoman from Sandusky, "and wonders why." And well they might; by all the ground rules, Governor Frank John Lausche of Ohio ought to be the worst kind of political liability. At 60 he is an unfraternal Democrat who often talks and acts like a Republican. He is the implacable enemy of lobbies and pressure groups of all kinds. Big-shot Republicans resent him; organization Democrats detest him; labor leaders denounce him as the foe of the workingman. His immigrant parentage arouses the suspicion of Mayflowering Americans. Protestants are skeptical of his Roman Catholic raising; devout Catholics deplore the fact that he is, in effect, excommunicated for marrying outside the Catholic Church. Even the schoolteachers of Ohio have reason to dislike him (he once vetoed a pay raise). He is a mystic who plays the violin or reads the poems of Robert Burns when he is moody, who keeps his own counsel, and who often agonizes in his own indecision. He runs from friends offering advice or seeking favors. He is intensely emotional, is sometimes moved to tears by the pathos of his own words.
Record Jackpots. Even in his personal appearance, he violates the rules. His fingernails often need cleaning. His iron-grey hair is as wild as a wad of steel wool. He has an instinct for rumpledness, and only the crafty vigilance of his wife keeps a reasonably presentable crease in his trousers. Nearly everything about Frank John Lausche that meets the unaccustomed eye seems politically wrong, and, to hear them talk, nearly everybody in Ohio is against him. Everybody, that is, except the voters.
For 25 years, from his goulash days as a ward heeler in Cleveland's working-class districts to the governor's mansion in Columbus, Lausche (rhymes with how she) has successfully violated the ground rules and spectacularly bucked bosses, bigots and big shots. Nearly every time that he has run for office Ohio's tabulating machines have clanked out record-breaking jackpots for him:
¶In 1943, for his second term as mayor of Cleveland, he copped 71% of the vote, an alltime record.
¶In 1952, in the teeth of the Eisenhower hurricane, he won a fourth term as governor, with an unprecedented margin of 425,000 votes—just 75,000 short of Ike's own mark in Ohio.
Lausche smoothly broke his own record a year ago, when he was inaugurated (with a cushion of 212,000 votes) as Ohio's first fifth-term governor.*
This year he might just as easily have made it an even half dozen. "My belief," he said recently (TIME, Jan. 23), "is that I could have been elected a sixth time . . . However, I would have felt embarrassed to go to the voters and ask them to vote for me on six separate occasions." He feels no embarrassment, though, in asking the voters for another favor: the seat in the U.S. Senate made famous by the late Robert A. Taft, and now uneasily occupied by George Bender. Lausche's eye is firmly fixed on the Senate, but if the Lausche luck holds, he may lift his gaze upward this year to a far more important job in Washington, the presidency.