CHAPTER 13

BY EARLY JUNE 2015, I had already made almost two dozen trips to the Granite State over the previous year and was fully immersed in the campaign—too immersed, in fact. In my world, the New Hampshire primary was the biggest story there was. In just about everyone else’s world, however, it was not. I was reminded of this when I arrived by train in Boston and made my way to the Avis counter, where three employees were gathered around a single cell phone. It was the day of Caitlyn Jenner’s big unveiling on the cover of Vanity Fair, and they were staring at the now iconic photo of the world’s most famous transgendered person.

“Oh. My. Gawd,” a male employee said in summing up the general mood of the powwow.

“Charlie is gonna flip out when he sees this,” a female employee in her red Avis polo shirt added.

I waved my arms to get their attention. Finally, the woman offered a meek, “kennah-helpyou,” but the two men couldn’t be pulled away from the phone they were still gawking at with mouths agape. This, I remembered with sudden clarity, was the kind of thing that most people actually cared about with the first voting still eight months away. Celebrity news continued to take precedence, and without a truly dynamic, can’t-look-away candidate in the race, politics just couldn’t match a sex-change celebrity for drama. Yet.

I got on the road and suffered through a driving rainstorm before I arrived for a late solo dinner at Martha’s Exchange—a cozy microbrewery and restaurant in Nashua. Now that I was safely within the confines of New Hampshire’s politically obsessed borders, I thought that I’d be able to turn my attention back to the campaign. I was again mistaken. It was mere moments after I put in my order for gorgonzola-stuffed chicken and an IPA that the bartender began raving to one of the servers about her reaction to the Caitlyn Jenner news. “I look up on CNN, and it’s ‘Call Me Caitlyn,’” she said, as if she could scarcely understand how a real news outlet could be reporting on such a trivial matter, which also happened to be the only thing she wanted to talk about. “I don’t care what people do with their lives. But that’s your news?”

“No, it’s your news,” is what I wanted to say. There was plenty of other news out there, just waiting for this bartender to consume, if she wanted to find it. News about the world. News about the local community. Hard news. Business news. News you can use. Whatever. It had never been easier to access any of it, via the wonderful series of tubes known as the World Wide Web. But Caitlyn Jenner was a story that people who consumed their news passively and in small doses could understand and pay attention to for a few nanoseconds, and so it was perfect for cable.

This internal rant got me thinking about the campaign again. What if there was a candidate who could do what Caitlyn Jenner was doing? Someone who had the ability to grab instantaneously the attention of the majority of people who were just going about their lives and not paying much attention to the election overall? As it turned out, we’d all find out soon enough. In the meantime, one candidate who definitely did not fit that profile was former Florida governor Jeb Bush. The son and brother of ex-presidents was the favorite candidate of the professional political and donor class, even as his early polling numbers among actual voters (the people who weren’t paying attention much) were historically weak for a so-called front-runner.

Bush still wasn’t even a candidate yet, not officially at least. He wouldn’t make his announcement for another couple of weeks, and his relatively late entry into the race had everything to do with funds. Jeb Bush was good at raising money. Very good at it, in fact. But he wasn’t satisfied with merely being the fund-raising leader in the Republican field. No, he wanted to be the political Scrooge McDuck with enough gold to fill a virtual-lap pool. And he was perfectly content to swim the backstroke in that pool while the other suckers in the race begged for whatever nickels on the dollar remained available to them. Bush’s entire focus throughout the first half of 2015 was not to introduce himself to as many voters in early states as possible but instead to keep hitting up millionaires for more donations to his super PAC—Right to Rise.

Campaign-finance law prohibited presidential candidates from coordinating directly with their super PACs. So from the moment that Jeb Bush said the words, “I am running for President of the United States,” his direct fund-raising appeals would thenceforth be confined to the $2,700 per election limit for individual donations to a candidate. (During a May 2015 non-campaign stop in Nevada, Bush accidentally let slip at a press conference that he was “running for president in 2016” before quickly correcting himself and adding the requisite “if I run” disclaimer.) But as long as Bush continued to act merely as a Definitely Running Non-Candidate and not “a candidate,” he was unfettered in his drive to raise unlimited funds directly through the super PAC. Once he uttered the magic words (and didn’t immediately correct them), he’d have to cut off coordination with Right to Rise, even as some of his most trusted aides would go on to run the super PAC. This was the kind of farce that the post–Citizens United campaign-finance landscape allowed, and Bush was eager to take full advantage of it. You couldn’t blame him and his advisers for pushing the limits. He didn’t make the rules. He was just exploiting them for all they were worth—always with a straight face.

During an election in which just about every real contender was testing the outer reaches of the campaign-finance system, Bush was the pioneer who had ventured deepest into this previously unexplored jungle of cynically pretending that he was still trying to make up his mind about whether to run months after it had become clear that he was already running. From his perspective, he had no choice. Money, and unprecedented amounts of it, was the one thing that might save him from a tricky conundrum: GOP primary voters didn’t like him all that much. Big donors, on the other hand, were smitten. Bush’s theory of the case was that he could “shock and awe” his rivals with his fund-raising prowess and then pick off a victory in one of the first four voting states—most likely New Hampshire. The first part of the plan was coming together swimmingly. The second? Not so much.

I set out to cover Bush’s latest New Hampshire visit as a not-yet-official candidate the day after my last visit with the New Hampshire Rebellion’s leaders, and campaign finance was on my mind. I wanted to ask him about whether his decision to remain, for the time being, a Definitely Running Non-Candidate might backfire and feed into perceptions that he was the candidate most tapped into playing the rigged game. It was a loaded question and perhaps a bit unfair. In theory, every candidate starts the race as a Definitely Running Non-Candidate—someone who is, as all future presidential contenders like to say, “testing the waters.” Bush wasn’t the only one who was still technically exploring. But what set apart the purebred Definitely Running Non-Candidate (Bush) from the plain-vanilla “potential presidential hopefuls” was the far-beyond-belief amount of time Bush had been willing to spend to perpetuate the obvious charade that he had not yet decided whether to enter the race. He was not a sitting governor or other official. Bush’s full-time job, for more than half a year at that point, had been to raise money for his technically nonexistent campaign. Was he just going to give it all back if he decided not to run? Bush raised over $100 million for Right to Rise and hired a large team of campaign operatives who moved to Miami to join his not-in-any-way-official campaign headquarters. Meanwhile, he continued to maintain with a straight face that he might well wake up one morning and say, “Nah, never mind.”

It was not lost on anyone that this posturing was ridiculous, and Bush himself didn’t do much to keep the ruse going behind closed doors. One potential Bush campaign hire, who was coveted by several Republican presidential contenders but ended up sitting out the primary campaign, told me that when he asked Bush during his job interview about his vision for how the campaign would transpire, the Definitely Running Non-Candidate replied with a curt, “Me winning.” Not that he’d already decided to get into the race or anything like that. Could go either way.

On the first day I followed him around the state, Bush began at an invitation-only business roundtable in Portsmouth. As is typically the case for business “roundtables,” the table where he and the local businesspeople who came out on the middle of a workday to see him was actually rectangular in shape. The discussion, though, was collaborative, as many of the attendees were keen on giving the Definitely Running Non-Candidate some advice on how to run his non-campaign. “I think the Bush family is an asset that you have,” one man told him. “You have a great story to tell, and your family does, and I hope you put that as part of your way of doing business in the campaign.”

I found this pressing concern over how Bush could get past the burden of his family name to be somewhat amusing. I mean, sure, Americans don’t tend to be huge fans of hereditary monarchies, and Bush’s elder brother was about as popular as scurvy when he left office. But Jeb Bush would not be Jeb Bush had he not won the Mega Millions lifetime lottery ticket that was being born into that particular family. Sure, he was undoubtedly smart, hardworking, and charismatic enough, and a generally capable guy who accomplished a lot in his two terms and had some pretty reasonable ideas about how to expand the Republican tent. But let’s not pretend that if he’d been born Joey Jefferson from Orlando, he would have been likely to find himself in a position to become governor of Florida—or, for that matter, risen to the ranks of a presidential front-runner, pulling in nine-figure sums in a matter of a few months. Yes, his family name was now a burden to him in some respects, but it was also a central reason he’d gotten this far.

After Bush took a few more questions at the square roundtable, his communications director, Tim Miller—a quick-witted and sharp-tongued rascal who happened to be a friend of mine—announced that the candidate would be doing an “avail” downstairs. An avail, as it’s typically called in campaign parlance, is the most common way that reporters on the campaign trail interact directly with candidates. It’s shorthand for media “availability,” that is, a press conference, but one that takes place on the fly with whomever happens to be on hand. On the freewheeling campaign trail in New Hampshire, in particular, avails typically have all the calm and civility of a four-year-old’s birthday party. This one was no different, and even Bush—who had already participated in many of these things, appeared taken aback when the most zealous of the reporters on hand stuck their microphones so close to his face that it looked like they were trying to feed him. After taking just three questions, Miller issued the time-honored campaign flack’s version of the bartender’s “last call” by doling out an emphatic, “Last question!” My chance to ask about campaign finance would have to come later that night at the invitation-only house party that Bush was attending in the wealthy, Republican-heavy town of Bedford, which lies just to the southwest of Manchester.

It was still light out when I arrived at Rich and Lori Ashooh’s Bedford residence. I pulled my rental car to the side of the street where I found Jason—a young, bearded tracker for the liberal group American Bridge standing just on the edge of the yard, safely within the realm of public property. Trackers try to make as insignificant an impression on the people around them as possible, while shooting video of every moment that they can, in case the candidate they are following around commits a gaffe that can later be exploited for political gain. Although it must be a wearisome existence to travel from campaign event to campaign event, shooting hundreds of hours of video among people who don’t want you there, trackers often make a significant impact on campaigns. It was perhaps George Allen, the former governor of Virginia, who ushered in the “YouTube era” of politics in 2006 when he famously pointed out to his audience the Democratic tracker who was following his campaign, introducing him as “Macaca?” As soon as the strange word left his lips, Allen morphed from surefire Senate winner and potential 2008 Republican presidential front-runner into a soon-to-be-defeated political trivia question.

You’d think that anyone blessed with more than a half-dozen brain cells would recognize that it’s probably best not to antagonize a person whose entire job is to get you into trouble—especially while his camera is set on “Record” and aimed directly at you. But the previous week, Rand Paul’s New Hampshire state director, David Chesley, had made news by approaching Jason’s camera at an event and licking the lens. The moment was duly posted on the Internet. When that kind of thing happens, it’s a good day for the tracker.

I had gotten to know Jason a bit over the previous months, and he was always helpful when I arrived at events, as he was usually early and I usually wasn’t. So after getting through the important stuff first—asking him about the details of Lick-gate—I asked if Bush had arrived yet. He had not, Jason told me. I thanked him and headed down the driveway toward the colonial New England home below. Trackers were never allowed inside invitation-only events. Instead, they had to stand on the margins in solitude, hoping to get a quick glimpse of the candidate on his way out of the party.

Former businessman Rich Ashooh was a local Republican power player who had run for Congress in 2010. He would go on to announce another campaign for the same seat in early 2016, taking on scandal-plagued Republican congressman Frank Giunta. In New Hampshire, there are few better ways to provide a boost to one’s own political aspirations than by providing a boost to someone else’s political aspirations, and so here he was lending the Ashoohs’ sparkling colonial-style home to Jeb Bush for the evening. Their spacious living room, dining room, and kitchen were packed shoulder to shoulder by the time I made it inside, but a few minutes of small talk with some of the guests revealed that few people there were avowed Bush supporters. All of them had previously met either his brother or father in New Hampshire, and they wanted to learn more about the next Bush in line, but they were far from sold on Jeb.

Bush entered the kitchen from the backyard and began making his way around the ground floor, methodically engaging with the crowd. There were at least a hundred people inside, all of whom were looking up at the Definitely Running Non-Candidate’s six-foot-four frame. I noticed that one of Bush’s advance staffers had carved out a little space in front of the fireplace, and I figured that was where Bush would address the crowd. I positioned myself directly in front of the space. Sure enough, after he had finished with the meet-and-greet segment of the program, he made his way over to the anointed spot. He muttered something about asking members of the media to move back to allow New Hampshire voters to get a better view, but I decided that I was quite comfortable where I was, and no one protested.

Next, the Definitely Running Non-Candidate launched into his non-stump speech, complete with the requisite, non-résumé boosting anecdote about how they used to call him “Veto Corleone” back in Florida. It was all boilerplate stuff for anyone who’d seen Bush speak on TV in recent months. Nonetheless, I started thinking about what a rare opportunity this was to get close to Bush in the early stages of the campaign—a time when it would typically cost you a hundred grand or so for the privilege.

Bush took eight questions from the audience, some of them predictable and easy to answer (Q: How are you different than your brother?… A: I’m better looking.) and some that led him into trickier territory (Q: Is climate change a national security threat?… A: The climate is warming, but it’s “intellectual arrogance” to suggest that the science is settled about the extent to which it’s man-made.). I was intrigued by the way the questions were being framed. Almost every time someone in the crowd asked him something basic about his policy views, he or she began with the ridiculous preface, “If you should decide to become a candidate.…” It was the prospective supporters’ way of telling the Definitely Running Non-Candidate that they were in on the joke, too, and were more than willing to play along.

As soon as Bush wrapped up the Q-and-A session and accepted the requisite burst of applause that followed, I took a step forward. Certain that even a brief opening exchange of pleasantries would give him the opportunity to escape politely, I let the reporter’s notebook and tape recorder in my hand serve as my introduction and jumped right into it. “Governor,” I said. “Do you think there’s something kind of absurd about a campaign-finance system in which you have to always say you’re not officially a candidate, you’re not running yet, and yet you have a big paid infrastructure, you’re raising millions of dollars—”

I thought there was a legitimate shot that he would let his guard down a bit and acknowledge, in some way, what was obvious. Yes, it was absurd. I wasn’t expecting a wink and a nod. But maybe a smile or a subtle eye roll.

Nothing. He didn’t even let me finish the question.

“It’s not a campaign,” Bush said flatly.

Right, it was a Definitely Running Non-Campaign. I already knew that. I shifted course and decided to play it straight.

“So you might not run?” I asked.

“I might not run,” he replied, refusing to break character.

At this point, Bush started looking around the room for an escape route. He found one in my friend Tim, who arrived on the scene to help his boss out with a terse, “Come on, Scott.”

I ignored Tim.

“What would cause you not to run?” I asked Bush.

“I don’t know,” the Definitely Running Non-Candidate said, still searching for a way to answer the question without outright lying. “I hope I get to the point where I make my decision relatively soon, and it would be—I don’t know what it would be, but I haven’t made up my mind completely.”

I suppose it’s possible that Bush might have passed a lie detector test in this moment. If he contracted a terminal disease the next day, for example, Bush probably wouldn’t have run for president after all. But barring that remote prospect, the idea that he was raising enough money to fund a small country for a few months and still hadn’t made up his mind about his intent remained absurd. I tried again.

“Do you have an idea of what you’d do with that money if you didn’t run?” I asked.

Bush definitely had enough of me at that point.

“No,” he replied. And then he turned away.

I headed back to my car a few minutes later, and my phone buzzed with a text message from Tim, the content of which was more or less exactly what I’d been expecting: “You had to be a prick.”

No, I didn’t have to be, I replied in obnoxious fashion. It was, I had to admit, kind of fun to put Bush on the spot over something so preposterous. Still, it didn’t change a thing about the absurd non-candidacy that a Non-Candidate was now permitted to get away with. I’d had enough of this particular charade for the time being. I wanted to spend some time with a different kind of candidate: one who had absolutely no chance of winning but knew how to lose the right way.

At lunchtime the next day, I pulled into MaryAnn’s diner in Derry, a large (by New Hampshire standards) middle-class town of about 35,000 people southeast of Manchester. Sporting an expansive dining room and brightly lit walls adorned with Americana kitsch, including a wide array of muscle-car photos and Betty Boop cartoons, MaryAnn’s was up there with Manchester’s Red Arrow Diner as one of the most frequented drop-by locales for presidential candidates in the state.

MaryAnn’s had enjoyed a strange moment in the national spotlight four years earlier when a run-of-the-mill visit by Mitt Romney took a hard turn into the deeply uncomfortable. It went down when Romney, while posing for a photo with a group of waitresses, decided that it would be a good idea to pretend that one of them had grabbed his butt. “Oh!” the Republican front-runner shouted, jumping up suddenly and flashing a practical jokester’s accusatory glance at the assailant he was attempting to frame good-naturedly, as the cameras rolled. “Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha,” Romney added. It had been both hard to watch and impossible to look away.

By the time I entered MaryAnn’s on this particular day, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham was already making the rounds inside. Dressed in what I would come to know as his standard campaign-trail attire of baggy khakis fit for a junior cotillion and a loose-fitting, navy-blue dress shirt and sport coat, Graham was accompanied by no discernible staff contingent. As easygoing and composed as Romney had been self-conscious and anxious, Graham approached diners one by one to hit them with his unique brand of positively enchanting militarism. “Some people don’t care about Benghazi,” he explained to a woman in his syrupy drawl, as he leaned over her table like an old friend might. “I do.”

Graham had an energy about him that was different than any other presidential candidate I’d encountered in person. In short, he was supremely accessible and utterly without pretension. He was also smart, charming, and genuinely funny. I could tell right away that this was a politician who truly enjoyed the give-and-take of campaigning in New Hampshire. When a diminutive woman with short-cropped hair approached him with her question, her cell-phone camera was already rolling to capture his response. “Finance reform,” she demanded. “Campaign-finance reform.” She elaborated no further. I leaned in closely to make sure I picked up every word of Graham’s answer.

“So after Citizens United, it’s probably going to take a constitutional amendment—maybe you can do it statutorily—to reign in the unlimited giving to super PACs,” Graham said.

I’d known that Graham was an advocate for a constitutional amendment to overturn the momentous Supreme Court decision, but it was kind of wild to hear him say so in person. The “solution” that almost all of the other GOP contenders were proposing was for a system that allowed unlimited individual giving, combined with immediate, full disclosure of the benefactors’ identities. The idea behind that concept was that the First Amendment protects financial contributions as speech (as the Supreme Court had determined) but that any political candidate who is being bought should have to let the whole world know about it right away, so that voters could take the information into account.

The concept had some merit. It would at least co-opt the absurd maze of outside groups and reporting gimmicks that had allowed donors to retain their anonymity through contributions to so-called social welfare organizations, many of which were nothing more than front groups for certain candidates. Still, it was hard to see how a system that allowed a single individual to deposit, let’s say, $100 million directly into one particular candidate’s bank account would do much to mitigate the broader problem concerning the outsized influence of money in politics. Graham’s constitutional amendment proposal may have been as much of a long shot as his own candidacy was, but it was inarguably bold. My fellow walkers in the New Hampshire Rebellion, I was sure, would have been impressed by the wispy-haired South Carolinian.

But then the woman had to ruin everything by asking Graham a follow-up.

“Are you for a constitutional amendment?” she asked, still shooting the exchange on video. At first blush, I thought the question an odd one. Graham had literally just finished saying that he was indeed for it. But the woman, it turned out, knew exactly what she was doing.

“If you write it in the right way,” Graham said. And then he added the ultimate hedge: “The other alternative is to say, ‘Unlimited giving. Your name’s disclosed, but just give it to the party to ensure its intent. That’s George Will’s idea, and it has some attraction to me.’”

Graham—who had just finished elucidating a bold proposal to fix a shattered system—suddenly was sounding not much different than every other Republican candidate. Was he really going to let me down this quickly—on the very first day of his candidacy in New Hampshire, no less? I wanted to ask him myself. And so a couple of hours later, I arrived at another of southern New Hampshire’s most revered casual dining institutions—MoeJoe’s Family Restaurant in Manchester. When I walked in, Graham was already waiting inside with his press secretary, Brittany Bramell, in an otherwise empty dining room. This was a man, I would come to learn over the next few months, who never acted like his time was more valuable than anyone else’s.

Although it was his first day in the state as a 2016 candidate, Graham was well acquainted with New Hampshire and its idiosyncrasies. He had spent the months leading up to the 2000 and 2008 primaries as an unofficial New Hampshire sidekick to John McCain, going just about everywhere that the Arizona senator—who sometimes referred to Graham as his “illegitimate son”—went around the state. And now he made it abundantly clear that he was tickled to be back, even as he showed off his McCain-esque penchant for dark humor, as he launched into the story about the time he’d declined an invitation to go see the famous Old Man of the Mountain rock formation that adorns New Hampshire license plates. “It’s not like it’s gonna fall down if I don’t see it today,” Graham recalled saying. It fell down a couple of months later.

I started to ask him some questions, but Graham kept looking for opportunities to get sidetracked and take in his surroundings. He loved this.

“Hey, Moe!” he said at one point, summoning the restaurant’s female proprietor and cutting himself off in the middle of a story about what it was like to grow up in the back of the bar and pool hall that his parents owned in rural South Carolina. Graham explained our conversation to Moe: “I was telling Scott that anyone who can run a restaurant or bar can be a good politician because you want ’em to come in, have a good time, laugh, keep drinking, and come back.” After spending most of my time in New Hampshire up until that point around politicians who wanted to win more than anything else, it was refreshing to be in this kind of low-key environment with one who was really just in it to enjoy the ride.

After he ordered two lobster rolls, I decided to hit him with the big question. “Is New Hampshire still New Hampshire?” I asked. “And can the little guy come here—” Graham cut me off. He didn’t need to hear another word. “After Citizens United, where you can have unlimited giving from unknown donors, the question is, Can New Hampshire survive?” he said, his tone now acutely serious. “If they go to national polling as an entry requirement [for debates], does that hurt New Hampshire? I think it does. My hope is that New Hampshire does survive because if it doesn’t, then it changes the way you nominate people to become president of the United States pretty dramatically because if it were Florida, California, or New York, I wouldn’t have a chance… this is a candidate-centric state, and that’s the antidote to big money.”

I thought that summed up the case for New Hampshire pretty succinctly, but Graham wasn’t finished just yet.

“I think it is the last line of defense,” he added with a flourish. “If big money is able to overcome the process in New Hampshire, then that’s a big blow to democracy.” I told Graham about the New Hampshire Rebellion and asked him what he thought of it. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “I think it’s about disenfranchisement. Campaign-finance reform is basically sort of just one of several issues where people feel like they’re losing control of their government and their voice. So after Citizens United, probably the only way to change the super PAC structure is to do a constitutional amendment. That’d be difficult. But at the end of the day, complete disclosure, even if you had unlimited giving, would go a long way.”

Moe brought out the lobster rolls. I declined Graham’s offer to take one, having already eaten lunch, and he began picking out the meat of one of the rolls with a fork, noting that he was “trying” to stick to a low-carb diet. Between chews, he shouted praise for the lobster back at Moe. I asked him whether his call for complete disclosure alone “at the end of the day” was a hedge on his support for a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United (it was, of course, but I wanted to hear him say so).

“If somebody could write one that I thought would work, I’d be open to it, but I don’t think it’s going to work,” he said, all but shooting down his own proposal again. “I don’t want to tell people in this Rebellion group that that’s a viable option.” I left the interview feeling a bit perplexed but convinced that there was something different about Lindsey Graham—something that was tremendously agreeable.

When I next heard from Graham later that night, it was immediately after a round of gunfire broke out. Upon the first unexpected volley, I resisted the instinct to duck. The salvo reverberated around the steep hills surrounding Beverly Bruce’s well-appointed property, which consisted of a sprawling country home sandwiched between two sizable barns. The shots had come without warning, but none of the several dozen guests who were mingling in the backyard showed any sign of concern. We were gathered in the wealthy solitude-seeker’s paradise of Center Tuftonboro—a little slice of no-man’s-land between the White Mountains vacation region and the northern edge of Lake Winnipesaukee. It was one of the swaths of rural New Hampshire where firearms outnumber people by a significant margin and “Private Property: No Trespassing” signs at the end of long dirt roads are best regarded as serious warnings rather than friendly suggestions. If the members of this upper-crust Republican crowd, literally sipping wine and eating cheese, had been entirely unperturbed by the unexpected artillery barrage, I figured that I should pretend to be unmoved by the outbreak of gunfire I’d just experienced.

As I waited calmly for the event to begin, I took a self-guided tour of one of Bruce’s barns—“the game room,” as I later learned she referred to it. The game room revealed the New Hampshire Republican activist’s love of firearms not by way of a gun rack, but rather through the unfortunate victims of her and her husband’s trigger-happy lifestyle, which were on display. There was a thick-maned lion presiding in the corner where a foosball table might have been in the game rooms that I was more accustomed to visiting in my youth. A few feet above a plush leather couch, a cheetah rested as comfortably as a dead animal can on a wooden beam, its long and spotted tail descending toward the heads of some of the guests in the room who continued to sip their wine. Others nibbled on brie and crackers, as they admired the zebra and hippo heads that protruded from the walls, flanking what appeared to be some sort of warthog petting zoo.

After a few minutes of perusing this makeshift natural-history museum or shrine to human savagery, depending on your personal views, I reemerged into the backyard. There in front of me was Bruce, the bespectacled homeowner and hunter of wild beasts. She wore a fur-and-animal-hide vest and an expression that said, “This is all perfectly normal.”

“My husband shot the sable, and we made a vest out of it,” she explained matter-of-factly to a guest who complimented her outfit.

Following closely behind Bruce and holding a generously poured glass of red wine came none other than the man of the hour, Lindsey Graham. My new favorite Republican presidential candidate wore the wide smile of a man who’d just experienced a big adrenaline rush, but I wasn’t entirely sure why. I asked Bruce about the gunshots.

“I greeted him at the door with my rifle,” she told me of her first encounter of the evening with the candidate standing by her side. “He said, ‘Can I shoot it?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ He said, ‘What can I shoot?’ So I had him shoot at a stump.”

As I chatted with Bruce, Graham was greeting guests one by one with one “how y’all doin’” after another, mixed in with laughter and sips of his wine. I was dumbfounded—not because I couldn’t believe that Graham could handle a firearm (although his slight frame and ill-fitting sport coat didn’t suggest a particularly intimidating presence on the firing range). I was just blown away that the long-shot Republican White House contender who had declared his candidacy on the previous day had already broken one of the cardinal rules of running for president: if you’re going to shoot a gun in New Hampshire, always invite the press to watch you do it.

It was precisely this strategic oversight that led me back to a strange and inescapable thought from earlier that day: I really liked Lindsey Graham. By that, I mean that I legitimately liked him as a person—not just in comparison to Ted Cruz or Rand Paul. I liked that Graham had shot Bruce’s gun with no one looking because he thought it’d be fun, not because he wanted to do a photo-op. I liked that he talked to people, as if they were actual human beings, unlike the 95 percent of political candidates—even the ones who are “good at retail politics.” I liked that he didn’t take himself too seriously, even as he was deadly earnest about his policy views. And I liked that he was willing to buck his party on key issues, in a manner that was unlikely to help him politically but made it abundantly clear that he actually stood for a principle or two. Also, I have to admit, I kind of liked that he had very little chance of actually becoming president. It mitigated some of the guilt I felt over openly admiring a candidate who was a bit of a saber-rattler when it came to his foreign policy views.

Even in a typical election, Graham wouldn’t have had much of a shot. In this race, he was dead in the water on Day One. Yes, he was an experienced third-term senator, a strong communicator, and a leading voice among Republican foreign-policy hawks. But as a five-foot-seven bachelor, he didn’t exactly look the part, and it didn’t help that he had a penchant for pissing off other conservatives. Among his apostasies: he believed that humans contribute to climate change, he thought the idea of deporting 15 million illegal immigrants was unwise and impractical, and—wouldn’t you know it—he considered the campaign-finance system to be such a disaster that a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision might be required.

Although he had been a fixture of TV news green rooms for decades and never had a problem coming up with memorable one-liners, Graham’s biggest problem of all was his lack of visibility. When Fox News and CNN announced that they would limit their marquee nationally televised debates to just the top ten candidates, as determined by national polling, Graham tried to put on a brave face. “OK, so you’re on the stage with ten people,” he told me. “You get, like, what—three or four minutes, if you’re lucky. Maybe you get a good sound bite. I’m going to be at a house party tonight for two hours. If you do enough of it, that puts you on the map in New Hampshire.”

If he was looking to history as his barometer in making that case, Graham wasn’t entirely delusional. When the 1984 campaign began, for instance, Gary Hart hadn’t been any more of a blip on the radar than Graham was. But this was 2015, and the national media narrative, especially as determined by the debates, was clearly taking precedence over making connections at house parties. Considering that he would never have a realistic shot of making the main debate stage, Graham’s role in the campaign had transformed from “extreme long-shot” to “Hey, we’re all gonna die anyway, right? Let’s have some fun with this thing!” And Graham knew how to have fun.

After he polished off his glass of wine, Graham retreated to the game room, chuckling as he read one of the “Do Not Feed the Animals” signs that were scattered around the premises. At one point, in the midst of Beverly Bruce’s personally guided tour, she pointed him to the hippo head, its thick white teeth hanging just a few inches above Graham’s own head.

“I shot that,” Bruce said.

“Was it self-defense?” the candidate fired back.

Graham was still just getting warmed up. When it was time for him to address the crowd of about one hundred people who had turned out for the event, Bruce introduced him to her guests as a “national security hawk.”

“There’s no hawks on the wall, and let’s keep it that way,” Graham replied.

As he stepped onto the elevated fireplace that would serve as his stage for the evening, Graham nearly impaled his arm on what appeared to be a long-horned antelope. He barely flinched before warning the audience not to “get gored.” As the laughs continued to spread around the room, Graham looked up at the adornments hanging above him on the wall and offered a friendly nod to the mounted water buffalo’s head and other horned creature beside it, whose species escaped my knowledge base.

“Bill, Hillary, how y’all doing?” he said with a friendly wave.

He wasn’t finished yet.

“If I say anything to piss Beverly off, I apologize. I thought the worst thing that could happen to you in politics is losing. Until I came here.”

Throughout this performance, Graham’s comedic timing was impeccable. It even inspired one member of the audience to try his own hand at amateur night stand-up. As Graham was still talking, this particular gentleman turned to the man standing to his right and offered up a gag about Hillary Clinton and Osama bin Laden. The recipient of the distasteful and decidedly unfunny joke laughed harder at this than he did at any of the truly entertaining things Graham had said, reminding me that as much as Graham wanted to be on the cutting edge of a revamped, sophisticated, inclusive GOP, the party itself wasn’t there with him. The Republican electorate wasn’t much interested in outreach. That membership wanted to be outraged. And Lindsey Graham wasn’t going to be the one to scratch that itch.

About an hour into the event, as people’s attention started to drift visibly, Graham went on an extended riff on how the Republican Party’s losses of the popular vote in five of the last six elections could be chalked up to its failure to appeal to minorities—Hispanics in particular. Only about half of the room applauded. But that didn’t dissuade the candidate from emphasizing his support for comprehensive immigration reform, as he put the joke-telling on hiatus to make a serious point. “I think we’re losing market share over the largest-growing demographic because of the way we’ve handled this issue,” Graham said. “And I still can’t figure out why we’re losing the Asian vote, other than to say this: If you seem to be mean and intolerant to one group, it bleeds over to the other.” All jokes aside, this was a powerful thing for a Republican presidential candidate to say. Graham was never going to succeed with the “burn it all down” crowd, but this was a message, I thought, that could resonate among some serious Republican voters in New Hampshire who wanted to win again. He was never going to win, I was still quite sure, but maybe he could work his way into the mix after all.

A couple of hours after the event, I was back at my hotel when I received a phone call from Brittany Bramell, who said that the senator would like to have a word with me. I figured that Graham wanted to emphasize one of the points he’d made during our conversation earlier in the day about promoting a more inclusive Republican Party. Or maybe, I thought, he was calling to clarify some facet of his public remarks.

As it turned out, Graham—a proud Luddite who had recently boasted of never having sent an e-mail in his life—had been scrolling through Twitter and saw a couple of photos I’d posted from Beverly Bruce’s house of horrors with some accompanying commentary relating to the indignities of running for president. “Listen,” he said, upon taking the phone from his press secretary. “If you really want to help get me elected president, keep putting up pictures of me posing with wild animals. And make sure as many Republican voters in New Hampshire see them as possible.” He let loose an avalanche of laughter and then hung up the phone.