ustxtxb_obs_1964_06_12_50_00009-00000_000.pdf

much a factor. Bonner said after the votes were in that he wished more people had realized the importance of the race, and that there is more hate in Austin than he thought. V John Henry Faulk, the entertainer and writer, narrowly won his Democratic precinct chairmanship in Austin despite a campaign that included an anonymous sheet and anonymous telephone calls saying falsely that he had withdrawn. V The Texas Republican convention June 15-16 may well be more important than the Democratic one the same days, although events will be vastly more perfunctory in Dallas than in Houston. -Sen. Barry Goldwater will speak on Monday in Dallas and will be given the state’s vital 56 votes for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday. By most of the dope charts this block of votes might shove his delegate total over 600, within two or three dozen votes of nomination.. Depending on other developments before then, it is possible that Texas’ 56 votes could give Goldwater his decisive pre-convention majority. V The pre-Democratic convention land scape, as best we can make it out: President Johnson refrained from taking any public position on what should happen at the convention. One can conjecture the principals, or some of them, and that there is some’ substance to the planted reports that a deal has been made for harhas enhanced Gov. Connally’s ability to have his way altogether with the convention by signaling to Johnson oriented delegations that they are in effect released to Connally, in which case a blown-up continue to be three groups of strength in the convention, clustered around Connally, Johnson, and Ralph Yarborough, and that in the nature of the case, none of these men stands to gain as much as he would lose from a blow-up, so some deals will be made. The liberal Democrats had not been involed in any known quid pro quo up to our press time, shortly after which liberal leaders were to caucus in Austin and decide on their convention strategy. V Texas AFL CIO President Hank Brown’s warning blast had not been mitigated so far, and amounts to this: that there will be two delegations from Texas at Atlantic City unless, at Houston, all legal delegations are seated, the districts are permitted to name their own members of the state Democratic committee, the national party flatform is endorsed, and all party nominees are pledged support in November. V June 15 in Houston, Sen. Yarborough and Gov. Connally will both speak at separate functions, Yarborough at a $25 a-plate dinner in the Rice Hotel to pay off his campaign debts, Connally at a State Democratic Executive Cmte. $10-a-plate dinner at the Shamrock. The dinners, which will require a couple thousand Dem ocrats to make a visible choice between the two leaders-at-odds, are represented as having been scheduled at the same time by a snafu, in which case they are a clear example, anyway, of the lack of communication between the “national” and the “Texas” wings of the Texas Democratic Party. V Connally reportedly intends to replace Byron Skelton of Temple and Mrs. H. H. Weinert of Seguin, the national committeeman and committeewoman from from Texas. Skelton is not pleased; Mrs. Weinert is reported to have agreed. V The Observer has collected various ma terials on disputed county conventions but defers discussion of these matters until they are further aired in Houston. The Senate in 1966 v Interest has already become acute in the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate against the Republicans’ John Tower in 1966. The Houston Chronicle’S Bo Byers quoted a source, “highly reliable as a member of Texas’ inner political circle,” but not named, that Atty. Gen. Waggoner Carr will run for the Senate, with Gov. John COnnally and Lt. Gov. Preston Smith going for third terms. \(This same source, however, said Sen. Yarborough’s forces have agreed to knock off talk of any bolt to Atlantic City, which, as of then, at any Cong. Jim Wright, Fort Worth, who encouraged speculation for many months that he would run against Sen. Yarborough this year, is regarded by some observers as a certain candidate for the Senate in 1966. Wright continues to declare that Fort Worth and Dallas are “one huge metropolitan area,” a contention with implications that would not hurt his candidacy ; the Fort Worth congressman even turned up at a harmony meeting of Dallas DemoMeanwhile, Carr told a committee of the legislative council that is preparing redistricting proposals that deviation from “one man, one vote” risks invalidation by the courts in proportion to the deviation, and that the legislature will even have to Oaths cross county lines in pursuit of the principle of proportional representation. It seems indicated that Carr and Wright can be watched as potential rivals for the 1966 Senate nomination, but Carr says Byers’ story was pure speculation. V Connally, readers may recall, used to feel so strongly against governors having third terms, he proposed a constitutional amendment to limit them t _o two. counted as a stance necessary to avoid his being written off by the legislature as a governor on his way out. His predecessor, too, was the object’ of this kind of speculation. Avoiding being written off as a lame duck by having it rumored you’ll run again has a way of metamorphosing, in Texas politics, into running again. . In passing, let it be recorded that the Dallas Times-Herald’s Margaret Mayer writes of Connally: “He is not just a popular state figure. He is a national and international figure.” V The legislature will be asked, by the Texas Restaurant Assn., to authorize the sale in public eating places of small sealed containers of hard liquor. V Texas judges, through the State Bar’s judicial section legislative committee, have plunked for raises of twelve thousand dollars a year for all judges at the district level or higher, apparently deciding to scuttle \(or at least to risk the hooed program for an appointive judiciary. ;V Cong. Bruce Alger quoted a Wall Street Journal article that Earle Cabell, the Democratic nominee in Dallas against him, is now opposed to federal programs for improving the city. Alger hooted, of course, and Cabell hooted back. But Alger howled in Washington over a condition he thought was “getting rather petty”: his apparent inability this year to arrange tours of the White House for his constituents, except once when he did so through a colleague. Money in Elections V Bexar County candidates for public office spent more than a quarter million the first primary alone, James McCrory of the San Antonio Express reported after his check of expense reports filed with the county clerk in San Antonio. Top spender was Sheriff Bill Hauck, at $20,847, a sum that was offset by contributions of $18,250. V “There is plenty of evidence that the candidate who can lay down the largest amount of the green stuff usually has the best chance of landing the office,” Jim Mousner, chief of the Houston Post Austin bureau, wrote in a column on this general subject. V John Bradshaw, candidate for judge of a new district court in Houston last Saturday, charged that he was offered “help” in paying his campaign debt \(which the runoff against George Cire, who was appointed to the new judgeship by Gov. June 12, 1964 9