New Way to Spell Nebraska

When he began his campaign for Governor, few Nebraskans outside his home town of Wausa (pop. 725) had ever heard of Republican Norbert Tiemann. To overcome that disadvantage, Nobby" Tiemann, 42, son of a Lutheran minister, dotted the state with billboards and filled the airwaves with spot commercials plugging the slogan: TIEMANN, Nebraska's New Way to Spell Governor." What the tall (6 ft. 3 in.), trim, small-town banker was actually telling the voters was that the time had come to find a new way to spell

NEBRASKA.

This month, Tiemann gave his constituents their toughest spelling lesson to date. By a 38-to-ll vote, the new Governor pushed through Nebraska's conservative, unicameral legislature a sales-income tax package that left New Hampshire the only state in the union with neither a sales nor an income tax. Nebraska still stands far down the list of states on public services. It is 39th in educational expenditures per pupil, 41st in teachers' salaries, last in state aid to public schools. Though its two conservative Republican senators--Carl Curtis and Roman Hruska--have given the state an image of doughty self-reliance, it is not reluctant to accept federal handouts: in 1965 only five other states received more federal funds per capita. As it began its 100th-birthday celebration this year, Nebraska was the very paradigm of uncreative federalism.

Time to Turn Loose. When he challenged former Governor Val Peterson in the G.O.P. primary last May, Tiemann--a former semipro baseball player--was determined to change all that. After a punishing campaign involving 600 appearances and 65,000 miles of travel, he beat Peterson by 15,000 votes. "We paced him just right," says Tiemann's campaign manager, David Pierson. "When election day came, we figured he was just about 14 hours away from total collapse." In the general election, Tiemann walloped liberal Democratic Lieutenant Governor Philip Sorensen, younger brother of ex-Presidential Speechwriter Ted Sorensen, by more than 100,000 votes.

Nebraskans still recalled indignantly that Ted Sorensen had castigated his native state as an "educationally depressed area" that was "old, outmoded, a place to come from or a place to die." Yet from the moment he took office in January, Tiemann has been telling them much the same thing. In his inaugural address, he warned that the only alternative to growing federal dominance was "the development of more responsive and more responsible state government." When he submitted his tax package to the legislature, he declared. "It is time to turn Nebraska loose."

Though the fetters are strong, tight and timehonored, Tiemann has gone a long way toward doing just that. "It's as if Nebraska has been shaken awake like some long-slumbering Rip Van Winkle," remarks a Lincoln Star political writer, "and is not too happy at the abrupt and rude awakening."

Tiemann established a new state department of economic development to lure industry, asked for more than $5,000,000 to establish a new research center, signed into law the state's first minimum-wage law ($1 an hour). He separated the state's penal and mental-health facilities, which had previously been lumped under a single administrator, hiring a penologist to head one division, a psychiatrist the other. At $30,000 a year, the psychiatrist is earning $12,000 more than the Governor, but Tiemann has not hesitated to hire good men at salaries exceeding his own. He moved to cut the state's 23,000-man payroll by 10%, not to save money but to take the extra funds "and give raises to the people who are doing the work." He has called for an increase of nearly 50% in spending for higher education, estimates that overall state spending will double to $100 million a year by the time his four-year term ends. His new tax measures call for a 2 1/2% sales tax, a personal income tax that will fluctuate according to the state's spending needs, and a corporate profits tax that will come to 20% of the income tax rate.

Pour It On. As a result of what the Omaha World-Herald calls Tiemann's "pour it on" campaign, several Nebraska newspapers have run a cartoon showing an insomniac elephant sitting up in bed and muttering, perplexed: "A Republican? Raising taxes? Spending?" Tiemann is well aware of the impact his proposals are having. "People tell me I will not get re-elected after all this," he says. "They say that I don't sound like a conservative Republican at all--but I don't consider myself to be anything but a conservative. What I'm trying to do in Nebraska is to make an investment in ourselves, and that's in the best conservative tradition."

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