The Music Man

Though the left side of his face was drawn by an ailment he did not explain, Iowa's Democratic Governor Herschel Cellel Loveless, 48, last week was a man in motion. "You are listening to a politician who is talking out of the side of his mouth," he cracked to a gleeful meeting of the party faithful one night in Des Moines. "I feel better than I look." He felt well enough to go ahead with his long-planned announcement that he will run for the U.S. Senate seat of Republican Thomas Martin, 66, who announced his retirement last week after 22 undistinguished years in Congress (eight House terms, one Senate term).

Roughhewn, farm-bred Herschel Loveless did not go to college, got a job as a railroad worker in Ottumwa, was the city's street superintendent when his handling of a 1947 flood turned him into a local hero and set him up for election ao mayor in 1949. Consistently underestimated by the dominant G.O.P. , even after he beat Incumbent Governor Leo Hoegh in 1956, he exploited his old-shoe manner to win easy re-election in 1958, began to look like a political Music Man to rebrassed Democrats and out-of-tune Republicans.

In the Senate race, the G.O.P. so far seems able to muster only token opposition against him (three relative unknowns announced for the Republican primary), will concentrate instead on an effort to win back the statehouse (three announced, among them Attorney General Norman Erbe). A Methodist who would like to be Roman Catholic Jack Kennedy's vice presidential running mate, Loveless will probably have little to say about foreign affairs in his senatorial campaign, but much to say about the farm program; he wants a minimum farm income to match labor's minimum wage. This is a formula that can do him no harm in the Senate race, and might commend him to Massachusetts' Kennedy, a big-city, East Coast boy who could use help in unfamiliar agricultural territory.

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