“Well, Gene,” Hart replied with a thin smile. “That depends on what happens tonight, doesn't it?” Pokorny stared at him, but said nothing. Like almost all the other key people on the staff, he was eager to move on to California.

“Yeah,” Hart continued. “We were planning on sending you out to California from here, but recently I've been thinking more and more about that slot we have open in the Butte, Montana office.”

Again, Pokorny said nothing. . . but two weeks later, with Nebraska safely in the bag, he turned up in Fresno and hammered out another McGovern victory in the critically important Central Valley. And that slot in Butte is still open. . .

Which is getting a bit off the point here. Indeed. We are drifting badly -- from motorcycles to Mankiewicz to Omaha, Butte, Fresno. . . where will it end?

The point, I think, was that in both the Ohio and Nebraska primaries, back to back, McGovern was confronted for the first time with the politics of the rabbit-punch and the groin shot, and in both states he found himself dangerously vulnerable to this kind of thing. Dirty politics confused him. He was not ready for it -- and especially not from his fine old friend and neighbor, Hubert Humphrey. Toward the end of the Nebraska campaign he was spending most of his public time explaining that he was Not for abortion on demand. Not for legalized Marijuana, Not for unconditional amnesty. . . and his staff was becoming more and more concerned that their man had been put completely on the defensive.

This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics. Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson's early campaigns in Texas. The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent's life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can't get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody's going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let's make the sonofabitch deny it.”

McGovern has not learned to cope with this tactic yet. Humphrey used it again in California, with different issues, and once again George found himself working overtime to deny wild, baseless charges that he was: (1) Planning to scuttle both the Navy and the Air Force, along with the whole Aerospace industry, and (2) He was a sworn foe of all Jews, and if he ever got to the White House he would immediately cut off all military aid to Israel and sit on his hands while Russian-equipped Arab legions drove the Jews into the sea.