The Impossible George Romney

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

EORGE Romney, the Republican governor of Va Michigan, was the main course on the open- ing day's luncheon of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association convention here this week. He was a natural choice. Newspaper pub- lishers want to be Republicans, although the party made it peculiarly difficult for them last fall. They begin then by inviting the President of the United States; and, when he regrets, they turn by habit to the most plausible Republican pretender.

Governor Romney took his position in the parade of honoured guests into the Waldorf ball- room in a fashion demonstrating why he seems the Republican pretender-designate. He was two places in line behind Adlai Stevenson, hereditary proprietor of the Bloomington, Illinois, Patio- graph, and four places ahead of former Senator William F. Knowland, publisher of the Oakland, California, Tribune. Just a little bit behind the liberal establishment's president over the water, and just a little bit further ahead of Barry Gold- water's California manager—exactly, in other words, where any man who has a chance for the Republican nomination in 1968 needs to be.

But that ground happens, of course, to be the immense acreage which Mr. Johnson has seized and made his own. This is the Republican prob- lem; sophisticated Republicans go on blaming Senator Goldwater because he made them a temporary party of outsiders in 1964; they would do better to ,blame Mr. Johnson, because he is well along to making them a party of permanent outsiders.

Governor Romney has always seemed so much the least disabled Republican politician that it is a puzzle why he was not nominated for president in 1964—the first election after he became visible —and it seems plausible for the mistake to be remedied in 1968. Robert Novak, the most inti- mate historian of the Goldwater aberration, remembers that, four years ago, Republican pro- fessionals assumed that the nominee would be Romney, because 'they were looking for some- body [unlike Rockefeller or Goldwater], who was not identified with factional strife and who [un- like Nixon] was not associated with disasters of the past.' He was re-elected governor of Michigan by 400,000 votes last November, the most pesti- lential month in the party's history; the original case for him has been strengthened almost beyond sensible opposition by four years of fratricide even more general and of disaster even more dreadful.

It is agreed that no pure Republican can sensibly offer himself for president in the pre- dictable future; Governor Romney is a suitably impure Republican whose reason for entering Michigan politics was a proclaimed determina- tion to free the state from partisan wrangles and give it a 'citizens' government.' The fundamental Republican faith is so distrustful of government as to be uneasy with any candidate who has made a career out of political office; the ideal was General Eisenhower, who had never even voted; Barry Goldwater was an alternative because he could be identified as a politician in opposition to all politicians.

But the alternative that excites is the man of affairs who is not a fat cat. George Romney made his mark as an automobile manufacturer, who fought and managed to survive in competition with General Motors and Ford, and as a reformer who managed to force himself on party poli-

ticians. He is possessed by a piety which seems

excessive to sophisticates, but which is a clear asset to a political party whose ordinary members are prouder of no achievement in their only two years of unmixed power than of the act of the Republican Congress which inserted the phrase 'one nation under God' in the oath of allegiance which school children take to the United States. He has the face favoured by casting directors for

roles of generals, cardinals and executives making command decisions informed by moral purpose and advancing the public safety and welfare.

And yet, even before an audience of American newspaper publishers, George Romney seemed an outsider. We were watching an actor who had been looking a little too long for a part at an audition of producers who have given up casting his type or, for that matter, any type at all. BC recited for them what actors call their 'credits': he had been in business in Mexico and he had been thrown out because the Mexicans envy our wealth; he had endured the loneliness of Wash- ington as a lobbyist for the Aluminum Company of America in the Roosevelt years. These were unfortunate reminders that a man can also lose as champion of the upper dog; the best of personal notices has trouble overcoming a record of so many shows that had closed.

His speech was immensely long, so much so that, !fter fifty minutes, he threw away its last five pages and improvised a desperate sixty seconds about how 'we got to have faith and we got to move fast.' He had been applauded just

once and then for the recondite urge that We modernise state government. But he had run into sodden depressed silence even at .the sentence:

'The decline in religious conviction, moral char- acter, and wholesome family life threatens as

most.' For Mr. Johnson has so pillaged the Republican wardrobe that he has even put on for his own the Republican foundation garment, which is sanctimony; since everyone wears it now, no one applauds it any longer.

Poor Romney ranted, of course, rant being the disaster of actors who feel the isolation of the play from the audience. And yet he made 3 splendid speech, at least inherently; and, if one could not imagine an American politics where its notions could be applied, one had to wish for an American debate where its complaint could be heard. His targets were big business, big govern- ment and big labour, those co-conspirators who are responsible for the American consensus. MI. Johnson is the grand commander of their coali- tion; and Romney stands outside to demand that 'the customer be put back in the driver's seat.

What the union member is to the labour boss, what the taxpayer is to government, so the

customer is to the businessman and none of these drivers wants to give up his seat to his rickshaw boy.

So here was Romney denouncing monopoly 10 men the most typical of whom owns the only

newspaper still publishing in his city. He could offer them no hero except Henry Ford the First• an outsider so entire that no politician since Stalin has dared suggest him as a model. George

Romney is the only plausible Republican cart' didate until he opens his mouth; after that, he becomes the only impossible one. Labour, in' dustry and government quarrel now and then over who is to share the profits; but only George Romney suggests cutting the price. He represents the one sort of extremism it is impossible to imagine an American political party acceptinP