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Moreover Muskie headed this week into Illinois, where he was entered in another hazardous contest in which he had little to gain and much to lose. He faced only the enigmatic former Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy, in a popularity contest, and mainly McGovern in a delegate selection race. Muskie had to win handily in Illinois. If he did not check his slippage, he could be set up for a knockout blow in Wisconsin. Yet there were still 21 primaries to go, each carrying a possibility of more surprises. Any conclusion that Muskie was doomed could prove just as premature as those earlier predictions that he had the nomination sewed up.
HUMPHREY. Although outpolled 2 to 1 by Wallace, Humphrey came in second by waging a personal, press-the-flesh blitz that left aides and newsmen gasping. He jetted by helicopter into tiny towns (Pahokee, Belle Glade, Wauchula), pinned HHH pins on buxom Jewish matrons in Miami, worked a Titusville shopping center three times. After 18 hours on the road, Humphrey flew to Miami one midnight and rushed off to a black sorority dance. He came back at 2 a.m., bubbling: "I danced with all those ladies."
Up at 5 one morning to handshake his way through a longshoremen's shape-up, Humphrey grumbled that reporters were not there. "Helluva way to cover the news." He clung to the roll bars of a swamp buggy in a race in Naples and drew applause for his courage. His doctor, Edgar Berman, joked that the Humphrey energy in a man just two months short of 61 is "a serious genetic defect." To fawning women who found Humphrey far more attractive in person than on TV, the candidate teasingly explained: "I keep vigorous by living clean and thinking dirty."
The onetime fiery civil rights champion tried to neutralize the Wallace antibusing advantage by waffling on it. He said that he was opposed to "massive compulsory busing that has as its sole objective racial balance based on a mathematical formula," although no court order actually requires that. He favored "integrated education," found it "fit, right and proper that you bus a child from an inferior school to a good school" but not the other way. He praised Askew's probusing stand and called busing a phony issue. "The real issue is quality education. What we need is more and better schools, not more buses." Humphrey, in short, was on both sides. With cheerful shamelessness, he offered something for everyone: kosher lunches for Jewish schoolchildren, plenty of jets for Israel, orange-juice stockpiling for worried farmers, a 25% increase in Social Security for oldsters. Arriving at a trailer camp, he burbled: "You know, I'm no Johnny-come-late-ly to mobile homes!"