Alabama: Wallace for President

Only a few hours after a Lowndes County jury had once again upheld white over right, Alabama’s Segregationist Governor George Corley Wallace took to TV to assure his constituents that no people in all the U.S. surpassed them in “culture and refinement.”

Moreover, he declared, an Alabamian would “make just as good a President-and maybe a little better—as someone from New York and maybe even from Texas.” And who in all Alabama is best fitted for that role? Of course.

To further this high-minded ideal, however, Wallace needs to be reelected, though the Alabama constitution expressly prohibits a Governor from succeeding himself. So last week Wallace convened a special session of his legislature to change the constitution and bought 30 minutes of television and radio time—with state funds—to tell the folks all about it.

Actually, if the legislature cooperates and the electorate approves the measure in a referendum, Wallace could win easily next year. Though it had been widely assumed that he would try to capture John Sparkman’s U.S. Senate seat instead—another easy goal—he decided after all that an entrenched Governor would be stronger than a freshman Senator in 1968.

Wallace’s new gambit is based on his apparently limitless ego, his surprisingly strong showing in the Maryland, Wisconsin and Indiana presidential primaries last year, and his belief that a third party might stand a chance in 1968.

Wallace reasons that the Republicans and Democrats may split the moderate vote and leave him as the conservatives’ only champion. In fact the only cloud on Wallace’s horizon is the prospect of stiff resistance on the gubernatorial succession issue from a small but determined minority in the state senate.

Though it would obviously benefit Sparkman to keep Wallace out of the contest for U.S. Senator, Sparkman’s chief lieutenant in the state senate, Bob Gilchrist, immediately declared that he would lead the opposition. To delay consideration of Wallace’s amendment, Gilchrist introduced a pile of extraneous bills and pledged to discuss them all in detail. Wallace thus faced the embarrassing prospect, for a Southerner, of a filibuster on his own home ground.