Governors: Return of Two Favorite Sons

In Illinois and Arkansas, two onetime Democratic stars attempt comebacks in gubernatorial races. In Massachusetts and Colorado, ideological differences raise sparks in two House contests. For the duration of the campaign, TIME will provide weekly reports on races for the House, Senate and Governors 'mansions that are important both for the personalities involved and for their refractions of national political trends.

Adlai III, Part 2

He was certainly trying. Mingling with 400 friends and neighbors who gathered on his Illinois farm for a beer-and-bratwurst fund-raising picnic, he wore a blue denim jacket and red Funk Seeds cap. In that down-home outfit, it was almost possible to forget that former Senator Adlai Stevenson III, 51, is a patrician intellectual and an unarousing public presence. Nonetheless, the crowd gave him a rousing sendoff, erupting with whoops and whistles when the local Democratic chairman asked, "Is Ad going to win?" Candidate Stevenson, meanwhile, just smiled, looking more embarrassed than flattered by the hoopla.

Is Ad going to win in his race against two-term Governor James Thompson? The Republican incumbent dropped behind Stevenson in the spring; a Chicago Tribune survey published last week puts Thompson ahead once again, 48% to 40%. It is the toughest race ever for two candidates who harbor presidential ambitions.

Stevenson, who decided in 1979 not to seek a third Senate term, mainly pounds away at one potent issue: the flaccid economy. In a detailed, 200-page campaign exegesis, he proposes luring pension-fund investments to Illinois and encouraging high-tech industries. During a debate earlier this month that rapidly turned acrimonious, he accused Thompson of presiding over the worst economic decline in the U.S., citing the state's 12.2% unemployment rate and soaring debt. Stevenson, who later accused the Governor of "subterfuge and deception" to conceal his failures, tried to justify the snappish tone: "I'm portrayed as bland and dull. As a tactical matter, I thought I ought to take him apart."

Their disparate styles figure prominently in a campaign between two political moderates. The Governor, 46, seems to be much that Stevenson is not: big and bluff, and happy to chat with anyone. Thompson, with $4 million in campaign funds (to $1.3 million for Stevenson), worked the crowd at Chicago's Labor Day Parade, wearing a hard hat and a Chicago Bulls windbreaker. "We had 4,000 Thompson balloons," he said. "We gave out stickers to everyone. There were only four Adlai hats and two pins--and Adlai didn't see them because he spent the day with his head down, talking to reporters."

Chicago voters in particular remember Thompson's career there as a crusading U.S. Attorney who won 300 political-corruption convictions. But "Mr. Clean" seemed a bit besmirched earlier this year, after disclosures that as Governor he had accepted expensive gifts from people doing business with the state. Stevenson has declined to harp on that affair. Such tempting distractions from his economic analyses, he feels, merely feed the media's "appetite for the sensational."

Southern star rising again

Two years ago, there probably was no more glamorous Democratic up-and-comer than Bill Clinton of Arkansas: Hollywood handsome and a Rhodes scholar, Clinton, then 33, was the country's youngest Governor. When he turned on the delegates as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention in New York City, the question seemed to be when, not if, Clinton would seek national office.

A few months later, Bill Clinton was an instant has-been. In one of the truly stunning upsets of 1980, Democrat-turned-Republican Frank White, a plain-speaking banker and political novice, defeated the Wunderkind, 435,684 to 403,241. The main reason: voters had been alienated by Clinton's hifalutin ambitions.

A rematch is now at hand. The candidates talk a lot about down-to-earth issues: jobs, crime and education. In fact, the central questions are personal: Is the once condescending Bill Clinton now sorry that he put on airs? And will voters give him a second term in Little Rock? Clinton insists that he has reformed. "I was too inflexible," he concedes. "This is a very personal state that requires a high level of accessibility. I'm ready to correct past mistakes."

Republican White is skeptical. "A leopard doesn't change his spots," he says. "The people of Arkansas knew he was using them. He thought he could fool them and spend his time advancing his own career." White's proudest achievements as Governor have been his reorganization of the state's vocational schools and his gusto for capital punishment. "I've set 22 execution dates," he declares. "Clinton wouldn't set any execution dates." White is riled by a federal court ruling that a state law he signed, requiring public schools to teach "creation science," was unconstitutional.

Clinton blames White, unjustly, for the record $227 million in utility rate increases approved last year by the state's public service commission. In the end, he is selling not so much a populist critique as a new, improved Bill Clinton who shares citizens' conventional values. It is telling, for instance, that his wife, Lawyer Hillary Rodham, who campaigned for him under her maiden name in 1980, now calls herself Mrs. Bill Clinton.

In the deeply Democratic state--the 135-member Arkansas General Assembly has only seven Republicans--any Democratic candidate enjoys a natural advantage, even if he is, as White says, "a tax-and-spend man." The expert wisdom is that Clinton has as much as a 55%-to-45% lead in a race that so far has not stirred the electorate. In fact, if Clinton does win, it could seem less a comeback than a canny mid-course correction in the path of a young, bright political star.

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