Nation: Young Bob

Ohio Republicans figure to send another Senator Taft to Washington next year. As a first step, they gave Robert Taft Jr., 47, an immensely impressive primary victory last week over Ohio Secretary of State Ted W. Brown, a respectable vote getter who has been winning in statewide elections for 14 years. The count: Taft, 605,505; Brown, 160,504.

“Young Bob,” as he is inevitably known, is no boy wonder. The grandson of a U.S. President and the son of a man who came to be known as “Mr. Republican,” Bob Taft, Jr., always wanted to make the political grade on his own. By deliberate decision he spent a decade in a slow but steady rise in Ohio politics. He served four terms in the state legislature, the last as its majority leader. In 1962 he turned back the pleas of old family friends that he run for the Senate against Democrat Frank Lausche, stood instead for U.S. Congressman-at-large and won 60% of the vote.

Toward the end of this year’s primary campaign, Brown hitched himself securely to the Barry Goldwater bandwagon, attacked Taft as a liberal. Taft replied in words his father might have used. “I,” he said, “am a thinking conservative.”

In November, Taft will face salty Democratic Senator Stephen M. Young, 75, who easily won renomination over an opponent who was officially absent from the race: Astronaut John Glenn, still ailing from a bathroom fall almost three months ago. Young got 515,362 votes to 201,175 from never-say-die Glenn admirers.

A Taft-Glenn contest would have been fascinating. But on the basis of his showing last week, young Bob could probably take on a couple of Steve Youngs with a John Glenn tossed in for good measure.