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New Jersey's Robert Baumle Meyner is an eminently practical politician who knows he has a long way to go. "People," he mused one day last week, "keep coming up to me and saying, 'Oh, you're going for it, aren't you? You're going all the way.' Well, these are people who just don't understand political nuances. This is a very delicate and tricky business, politics."
Meyner's understanding of the delicate and tricky business of politics has converted New Jersey, for decades a Republican stronghold, into a Democratic state. This year Meyner gained prestige when his protege, former Congressman Harrison A. Williams, won by 89,000 votes against rugged Republican opposition and became U.S. Senator. Moreover, for the first time since 1937, the New Jersey general assembly went Democratic, 42 to 18.
Meyner has some presidential handicaps. He was born a Catholic, left the church at 18 and has not joined another (whispers a Kennedy backer: "Meyner's not too popular among Catholics, you know"). He is hardly known outside New Jersey, and his rare ventures away from home have been singularly unfortunate. In a nine-state speaking tour last August, he chose a shirtsleeved Minnesota farm audience, ready to plow under Ezra Benson, to lecture on the subject of "The Current Congressional Inquiry into the Operation of the Federal Regulatory Agencies."
Nonetheless, Meyner followers hope to get their regional entry to announce soon, hope by next January to have a start on a presidential organization divided into three sections: political, research and financial. "Intelligence papers" will be compiled on the delegates to the 1956 national convention ("On the theory that 75% of those who go to the next convention were there before"). Prospective delegates will be approached with a soft sell. "We won't be knocking anyone else," says a Meyner man. "If they say they like Kennedy, we'll say fine, he's a splendid guy, but if he doesn't make it, we'd like them to consider Meyner as a second choice."
Brown: Delightful Dilemma
California's Pat Brown is happily aware of the national prominence into which he was catapulted by his 1,012,000-majority victory over Republican Bill Knowland for Governor. Last week, at La Quinta, a resort about 20 miles southeast of Palm Springs. Brown, dressed in swimming trunks and a flowered sports shirt, sat basking in the desert sun and in a delightful dilemma: whether to hew sternly to a campaign pledge to serve his full four-year term as Governor or to sound like an oracle when people talk about him for the Democratic national ticket in 1960. He chose the oracular: "I believe in a certain philosophy of government—of a government which serves all the people—and I think that as Governor of California I'll have a chance to work for that kind of government not only in this state but in the entire nation."