Florida: A Wave Either Way

However they vote for Governor Nov. 8, Florida’s electorate will opt for a new political climate in their state. The choice is between Robert King High, 42, a liberal, city-oriented Democrat, and Claude Kirk, 40, a conservative upstate Republican. Neither description fits any chief executive of Florida since Reconstruction. And for the first time since 1876, a Republican has a fair chance of winning.

Since Dwight Eisenhower’s first presidential campaign, Republicanism in Florida, as in much of the Old Confederacy, has become respectable. G.O.P. national tickets carried the state in 1952, 1956 and 1960 and came within 43,000 votes of winning in 1964. The conservative Democratic establishment, backed by the pulp, citrus, mineral and commercial interests north of Dade County and Miami, clung to power in state elections.

“Demo-Kirks.” The man who changed that, and thus gave Republican Kirk his big chance, was Tennessee-born Bob High, now in his fifth term as mayor of Miami. Proclaiming that “the issue is integrity,” Teetotaler High upset Incumbent Governor Haydon Burns in an acrimonious Democratic primary fight (TIME, June 3). Burns has withheld support from High, and many Burns followers—including the wealthiest backers—have become “Demo-Kirks.”

An Oklahoma-born investment banker who supported Goldwater in 1964, Kirk praises the outgoing Burns administration, while damning High with the same “ultraliberal” label that Burns used. Kirk promises an “antitax, probusiness” administration to promote the “American dream,” says he will increase state revenue by $1.3 billion over two years by luring new industry with tax breaks. “The only thing that prospers in Miami,” says Kirk, “is crime.” Though he avoids civil rights as an overt issue, Kirk’s constant emphasis on High’s ideological ties with the Johnson Administration needs no decoding.

“Loaves & Fishes.” Such tactics have inhibited High. “The issue is still integrity,” he says, but Kirk, unlike Burns, provides no target for this shaft. With the President’s popularity sagging and racial tension a constant undercurrent, High has found it prudent to skirt national issues and play down his own progressive record on civil rights and legislative reapportionment. On the crime issue, the Bade County government, rather than the Miami mayor’s office, has the primary responsibility for law enforcement; yet even to make this point would only underscore the ceremonial nature of his present job.

Still, High is not entirely without ammunition or allies. He derides Kirk’s plans to cut taxes as the “miracle of the loaves and the fishes.” High proposes instead to raise taxes selectively on both industry and consumers in order to spend more on education; to reform a tawdry state government with conflict-of-interest legislation and restrictions on lobbying; to streamline state agencies; to investigate “price gouging” on the part of food distributors, and in general to protect the “little people,” Redhaired, slight and boyish-looking. High is a more effective and experienced campaigner than his earnest, somewhat ponderous opponent. “A political tidal wave is coming,” predicts High. Last week, though six of Florida’s seven major newspapers have come out for the Democrat, it still looked as though the wave could sweep either way.