Maryland: Cavalry Charge

A running gag in Maryland throughout the presidential campaign had it that if Hubert Humphrey won the election, local Democrats would immediately demand a recount. For the Democrats were well aware that when the Republican Party won the White House, it lost the statehouse. When Vice President-elect Spiro Agnew resigns his governorship some time after the Electoral College makes his election official on Dec. 16, Maryland’s general assembly is certain to choose a Democrat to succeed him for the remaining two years of his four-year term.

Marvin (“Buddy”) Mandel, 48, speaker of the house of delegates, state Democratic chairman and the man who most helped Agnew to govern successfully, has the inside track on replacing him. In fact, Agnew may even quietly urge Maryland’s 33 G.O.P. legislators (v. 152 Democrats) to support Mandel, who helped him to enact income tax reform and an open-housing bill as well as to repeal Maryland’s antimiscegenation law. A quiet veteran of 17 years in the legislature, Mandel appoints all house committees, signs all bills, and presides over its sessions with a composure that only rarely abandons him (he has bitten through half a dozen pipestems, broken two gavels during tense moments).

At least nine other Democrats and a single Republican, Senate Minority Leader Edward T. Hall, are vying for the job in a race that one of the candidates has likened to a cavalry charge. Agnew, returning last week from a Caribbean holiday and a visit with President Johnson in Washington, declared that he planned to steer clear, “as far as possible,” of the impending donnybrook. Even Ambassador to France Sargent Shriver, a Maryland native, has been suggested as a possibility, but the Kennedy brother-in-law categorically disclaims interest. There are few Maryland Democrats who can honestly do the same. House Majority Leader Tom Lowe, for instance, is a close friend of Mandel’s, but admits: “If Marvin falls on his face, he’ll have a size-ten shoe—mine—between his shoulder blades.”

Shoulders hunched, Mandel runs hard. “We’ve never had a Jewish Governor before,” says another friend. “But hell, we never had a Greek Governor before, either.”