New York: Rocky Redivivus

When Nelson Rockefeller decided to try for a third term as Governor of New York, the polls had Rocky on the rocks. Since then, the gap between Republican Rockefeller and his Democrat ic opponent, New York City Council President Frank O’Connor, has closed, thanks largely to the Governor’s unexpectedly hard-hitting campaign.

His fingers calloused from handshak ing, the Governor has used bus, heli copter and his family’s jet-prop plane, The Wayfarer, to bound from one up state community to the next. He has clambered up ladders at construction sites, tossed footballs with college boys, delivered weighty university lectures on federalism, at one point even dropped in on a Jewish circumcision celebration.

He has spent huge amounts—$227 a minute, say the Democrats—much of it on TV spots pointing up his administration’s accomplishments. Showing no signs of deceleration, he toured his native Westchester County last week, drew crowds of up to 1,000 people at stops timed to the second. Along the way, local G.O.P. candidates, who hitherto had been reluctant to be identified with Rockefeller, scurried to his side.

Listless Talk. While Rockefeller was busily dispelling the tired-blood stigma that had bedeviled him, O’Connor was mired in a dull, perfunctory campaign. Stumping upstate, the Democratic candidate arrived at Endicott (pop. 19,-000) too late in the afternoon to greet most of the workers leaving the town’s large IBM plant. That night he wandered around shopping centers vainly trying to find hands to shake. Next day he showed up for a speech in the Chenango Valley town of Norwich (pop. 9,200), found fewer than 20 people waiting for him at a local restaurant. Returning to Manhattan, he showed up for a Herald Square speaking date 90 minutes after aides began touting his imminent arrival, then delivered a listless five-minute talk.

O’Connor explains that he does not want to “peak too fast,” but his campaign plainly suffers from haphazard organization. Moreover, he has to contend with the candidacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., who became the Liberal Party’s gubernatorial choice after losing the Democratic nomination, and is sure to siphon off votes that would otherwise have gone to O’Connor. To compound O’Connor’s woes, Rockefeller’s progressive record, notably an increase in the state minimum wage to $1.50, has cost the Democrats some of their customary labor support. The 250,000-member Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York has endorsed Rocky. The state A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council, which usually bestows an automatic blessing on the Democratic candidate, last week voted to remain neutral in the gubernatorial race.

Month Early. The biggest obstacle in Rockefeller’s way is New York’s 2% state sales tax, which he pushed through last year despite a 1962 campaign promise not to do so. Small shopkeepers complain bitterly of the extra paper work entailed by “Rocky’s tax,” but the Governor has suggested simplified bookkeeping procedures, and emphasizes the increases in state aid, particularly in education, that the tax brings to local communities. Rocky has boosted his stock with Negro voters by announcing plans to construct a 23-story state office building in Harlem, last week made a pitch for exurban commuters’ support by joining with Connecticut’s Governor John Dempsey in a state-federal proposal to take over operation of the ailing New Haven Railroad. Though a month has passed since his nomination, O’Connor—who is tagged as a machine candidate—only last week won the blessing, a curiously double-edged one, of New York City’s former Democratic Mayor Robert Wagner. “In all candor,” admitted Wagner, “at one point I had some worry about those listed as supporters” of the O’Connor ticket. To pep up the faltering Democratic campaign, Senator Bobby Kennedy at week’s end stumped upstate communities with O’Connor a month earlier than he had planned. His influence may be more ironic than effective, for O’Connor only won the nomination after Bobby failed to put over his own gubernatorial candidate this summer.