CHAPTER 18

IT WAS EARLY ON a Sunday morning in October 2015, and the weekend crowd at the Manchester Hilton Garden Inn was just starting to file into the breakfast area for the buffet. The special of the day was the frankly daunting potato pancakes topped with barbecue sauce and bacon. I took a seat at a table for four in front of the bar, ordered a cup of coffee, and watched a few minutes later as John McCain emerged from the elevator. Before I could get up, the seventy-nine-year-old Arizona senator was greeted in the hallway by Brittany Bramell, who worked on his 2008 presidential campaign. McCain ducked behind the fireplace for a few moments of privacy with Bramell. I didn’t know what was happening but assumed she was briefing him before the interview we had scheduled. A few minutes later, McCain reemerged and made a beeline for the buffet. Meanwhile, Bramell came over to say hi.

“What was going on back there?” I asked her.

“Oh, I have to comb his hair every morning,” she said.

Oh, right. The man whose military service Donald Trump had famously denigrated couldn’t comb his own hair because he couldn’t lift his arms to his head. And he couldn’t lift his arms to his head because of the broken bones he’d suffered upon being shot down over North Vietnam, landing in a lake, and then enduring unspeakable torture during his five-and-a-half-year stint at the Hanoi Hilton. McCain had been living with his physical handicap for almost half a century, but the senator wasn’t one to talk about his own courage unprompted. He much preferred to regale audiences with profane and evocative stories from his more than three decades of government service. There was no topic he liked to discuss more than New Hampshire—the state that became like a second home to him during his two victorious primary campaigns in 2000 and 2008. The reverence that McCain had for the people, process, and history of the New Hampshire primary was deep, and the feeling mutual. No person, living or dead—excluding, perhaps, Bill Gardner—better captured the essence of the primary at its best than John McCain.

He sat down at my table with a bowl of cereal and a blueberry scone in hand and offered a “Good morning.” When I asked him about his current endeavors on the trail, McCain acknowledged that it had been tough sledding trying to drum up support for his buddy Lindsey Graham, for whom he was preparing to set out on another day by his side, crisscrossing the state. It was like old times, only without the receptive audiences. “I wish it was better,” McCain said, adding unconvincingly that there was still a lot of time left for Graham to turn things around.

He was eager to get out of the present and start talking about the past, and I was happy to listen. McCain’s memory for details of campaigning in New Hampshire had faded a bit, but his delight in it was contagious. He was wearing on his right wrist a replica of a bracelet that was given to him at a town hall meeting in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in August 2007 (the original one broke, and he had it replaced) by the mother of Matthew Stanley, who was killed in combat outside of Baghdad. She had asked McCain to wear it under the condition that the candidate promise to do everything in his power as president to make sure that her son’s death wasn’t in vain. It was a story that McCain retold often on the 2008 campaign trail and one that left few dry eyes in the room, no matter how many times people had heard it.

Despite there being no scarcity of poignant memories like that one from his 2008 run, most veterans of McCain’s two presidential campaigns will tell you that the 2000 one was their favorite. That year, he found himself as a true underdog from the beginning—a position that allowed him to run exactly the way he wanted to and probably have more fun than any presidential candidate has had in New Hampshire before or since.

The enduring love affair between McCain and New Hampshire began in Peterborough, a postcard-perfect town nestled into the mostly rural stretch of rolling hills between Keene and Manchester. All across this prototypically New England small town, American flags flutter in front of colonial-style homes, and the Worcester Lunch Car–style diner has remained mostly unchanged since it opened in 1949. The street sign that welcomes visitors calls it “a good town to live in,” and for McCain, Peterborough proved to be a good town to campaign in. In particular, the two-story Peterborough Town House at the center of town proved to be McCain’s favorite venue in all of New Hampshire. With its white pilasters and octagonal tower perched at the summit and Old Glory flanking the lantern-lit entrance, the building practically bled Americana through its red bricks.

In the summer of 1999, McCain was a relatively obscure senator who had not yet formally launched his long-shot presidential campaign. The legendary days of the freewheeling Straight Talk Express and passionate throngs of New Hampshire supporters dubbed “McCainiacs” were still in the future. At the time, McCain was facing down the prospect of competing not only against the George W. Bush juggernaut and all of the front-runner’s financial might but also the largely forgotten—but at the time formidable-seeming—candidacy of Elizabeth Dole (not to mention a handful of other middling competitors, including Steve Forbes, Lamar Alexander, and John Kasich). Barely registering in the polls and with almost no money, McCain’s small New Hampshire staff attempted to promote his first town-hall meeting in Peterborough by sending out a direct-mail barrage to thousands of local voters, which enticed them with an “ice cream social” that would feature the Arizona senator.

Among those who were there, estimates of the crowd count for the event have tended to decrease steadily over time, but the body of evidence suggests that somewhere between a dozen and thirty people showed up. The campaign had planned to hold the event in the expansive, balcony-equipped auditorium but because of the lack of interest, they moved it to the basement. “There wasn’t one person under age seventy,” according to McCain. And most of the retirees who did make the trip were more interested in the free hot-fudge sundaes than they were in hearing McCain’s arid pitch about the importance of campaign-finance reform.

It was an inauspicious beginning. Still, the upstart candidate didn’t try to change his message to appeal to a bigger audience. Instead, he vowed to out-hustle every other candidate in the race, especially Bush, who campaigned in New Hampshire infrequently and with his motorcades and large contingent of Texas rangers keeping him at an imperial distance from voters. Eventually, people started to notice. As McCain slowly built momentum in the coming months, his 2000 campaign became the quintessential example of a candidate using New Hampshire to propel himself from afterthought to legitimate presidential contender. McCain more or less perfected the art of the New Hampshire town-hall meeting format, not as a stage to get some nice photos and footage for the evening news crews on hand to use, but rather as a setting by which he would earnestly attempt to win over voters a few at a time. Curious New Hampshirites who saw him at small venues around the state and came away impressed would then convey their favorable impressions to friends and family, and interest grew by word of mouth. It was social media for the dial-up age. There couldn’t have been a more old-fashioned manner of campaigning, and it suited McCain perfectly.

One of the key factors that made New Hampshire voters—particularly independents—start paying attention to McCain was that he talked about things Republicans didn’t normally talk about, especially his quest to rid government of “big money” influences. According to polling, campaign-finance reform was not among the most pressing concerns for most people, but McCain spoke about the issue in such a passionate and genuine way that his interest in doing something significant to upend the system began to rub off on a sizable swath of the electorate. He ended up holding 114 New Hampshire town-hall meetings leading up to the 2000 primary. The state couldn’t seem to get enough of the man who embodied its unflinching, sarcastic, and hard-to-please character.

The media liked him, too, and McCain would often joke that the smitten journalists who tagged along with him were his “base.” As they rode with him on the bus, they enjoyed the kind of give-and-take with the candidate that became much harder to replicate in later presidential campaigns when the Internet really took hold. Sometimes reporters would run out of questions and start talking to McCain about their own families and life in general. It was all pretty cozy (probably a little too cozy), but around-the-clock was just the way McCain liked to operate. “We started getting up early in the morning and having early morning town-hall meetings before people went to work,” he recalled to me with wistful delight. “That way, if you start early, you can do four or five a day.”

There were plenty of times when McCain said something that he shouldn’t have said to a reporter. But there weren’t many “gaffes,” in the way we think of them today. Little of what he uttered stuck out in a negative way, in part because he was saying so much that the media would quickly move on to something else. More than anything, McCain liked to get out into the hinterlands—away from the Manchester area and the seacoast to musty, long-neglected VFW halls in the state’s sleepy midsection and far-flung North Country outposts where he could take in the natural elements that energized him, while also getting more media bang for his buck. “Another aspect of the small towns is that they appreciated you coming,” McCain told me. “And what my opponents didn’t understand, even if you were in a small town, the national media by the thousands are looking for anything. So they’d show up and join on the bus. Later in the campaign there would be almost as many reporters as people at the town halls.”

One of McCain’s most memorable bus trips of the 2000 campaign began in Dixville Notch, the wooded hamlet just south of the Canadian border where Neil Tillotson—the inventor of latex gloves, who was then one hundred years old—first organized and continued to carry out the midnight vote at the Balsams resort. McCain was pleased to get a meeting with the local legend. Here was a man, he knew, who would be happy to indulge in McCain’s favorite pastime: extensive conversation about the good old days.

“Tell me something, Mr. Tillotson,” McCain asked him in a story that he would recall time and again over the years. “Out of all these candidates who come up here every four years, who has been your favorite?”

“Roosevelt!” Tillotson replied.

“Wow, Franklin Roosevelt. A four-term president—”

“No,” Tillotson said, cutting McCain off. “Teddy!”

The day before the primary and with momentum now clearly on his side, McCain wisely declined to attend a Bisquick-sponsored pancake breakfast at the Army National Guard Armory in Manchester. The two Republican candidates who did take part in the festivities were Bush and Gary Bauer—a prominent Christian conservative activist. Arnie Arnesen, a liberal state-level operative turned talk-radio host, had been asked to emcee a pancake-flipping contest between the two GOP contenders, who were both struggling to keep up with McCain in New Hampshire.

First up, the Texas governor approached the task with his characteristic swagger. Escorted by Tom Rath, his top New Hampshire political consultant, Bush moseyed onto the stage, delivered a few remarks, and flipped a pancake. But not only did he flip it, he flipped it high—too high for most anyone who doesn’t practice flipping pancakes on a regular basis to catch. But Bush did catch it—and not in the expansive pan with which the pancake was made. No, he landed the thing on the small spatula that he used to flip it, while the pan rested on the stove—a daring method that added several degrees of difficulty to the feat. Perhaps knowing that it would be the last victory his candidate would have in New Hampshire that winter, as the pancake landed dead in the middle of Bush’s spatula, Rath raised both of his hands in the air in triumph. Not done yet, Bush then flipped the pancake into his free hand with a casual flick of his wrist. Then he winked and pointed at a couple of members of the audience before leaving the stage with the strut of a rock guitarist who’d just shredded the final notes of “Free Bird.”

“I want you to know that was not a rigged event,” a clearly impressed Arnesen told the crowd. “He actually caught it with the flipper, not with the pan!”

Next, it was Bauer’s turn. As he approached the stage, Arnesen decided to needle the far more diminutive of the two Republican candidates. “I just want Gary to know that Tom Rath suggested to me that Gary might show his proficiency with short stacks,” she said into the microphone.

The joke didn’t totally make sense, but Arnesen’s playful jab seemed to rattle the physically timid Bauer, who—it was now already clear—was not a man who was up to the task of flipping a pancake in front of a crowd with the ease that Bush conveyed. And yet he had nothing to lose. With McCain absent, Bauer had to at least try to beat Bush at something—even if that something was the act of tossing solidified batter into the sky and then catching it with a tool that was ill-equipped for the task.

And so Bauer flipped his pancake. He flipped it high—dangerously high—higher than Bush had. Too high, as it turned out. High enough and with enough backward momentum that when gravity began taking its hold, the pancake drifted well behind Bauer’s head. It was out of reach. But Bauer didn’t give up. The presidency was on the line here! He backpedaled a bit like a baby deer trying to gain its footing, and then he shifted his body to the left. For Gary Bauer, time must have seemed to slow down at this point. He surely realized that it would have taken a miracle for him to catch the pancake on the spatula—a miracle even more spectacular than the act of God that would have allowed his flagging campaign to remain afloat after New Hampshire’s voters had their say. And so, Bauer gave up on trying to catch the pancake with his spatula. But he had a backup plan. He reached out his left hand at the very last moment and caught the pancake with the frying pan. Wow, good enough! Bauer could now settle for a respectable second-place showing in the pancake flip, as long as he could finish securing the pancake in his pan and prevent it from hitting the floor. He just had to stick the landing.

He didn’t. In a jaw-dropping instant, Gary Bauer began to stumble off the stage. As he tumbled backward, his legs shuffled under him in place in the manner of Wile E. Coyote when the cartoon character has already fallen off the cliff but hasn’t realized it yet. And then, Bauer plummeted over the edge, careening into a blue curtain and landing out of sight of the dozens of video cameras that were trained on him. Arnesen provided the play-by-play: “Whooah… Ooooooh. Oh, no. Oh, no. Candidate missing in action!”

To his credit, Bauer was resilient. He licked his wounds and then sprang back onto his feet within seconds. Then he leaped back onto the stage and gave the crowd a double-thumbs up, trying to put on his best game face. “I’m a fighter, folks!” he said with an accompanying, machine-gun burst of nervous laughter. Arnesen, meanwhile, pronounced his performance worthy of a Perfect Ten: “And who said this wasn’t going to be an exciting event?”

As Bauer was recovering from his wounded ego, and with a big snowstorm blanketing the state, McCain finished his final New Hampshire sprint with a series of outdoor events in Keene, Hanover, and Concord, ending the day in Portsmouth. His campaign had conducted some late polling, and the Arizona senator knew that the race was breaking his way—though he remained oblivious to the extent that he was dominating Bush. It was snowing hard as McCain delivered his closing remarks on the Portsmouth waterfront. The captain of a passing merchant ship kept blasting the vessel’s horn, sending the crowd into a frenzy with the racket, which at times drowned out the candidate’s words. The New Hampshire primary had found its icon.

With New Hampshirites shoveling out after the snowstorm on Primary Day, February 1, 2000, it was clear that McCain was likely to win. The most recent polls showed him beating Bush—who had won Iowa easily—by a margin of eight to ten points. But one final concerning moment for the famously superstitious McCain came when he visited a polling station that morning in Concord. A woman who was running the voting operation there was none too pleased when the candidate appeared unannounced with his wife, Cindy, and the accompanying media entourage in tow. “Senator McCain, you’re disturbing the right of the people of New Hampshire to cast a vote!” she shouted at him. “I want you out of here now. That means you too, media!”

“Shit,” McCain thought to himself. “This isn’t exactly what we wanted!”

That theoretically bad omen, however, proved to be without merit. McCain went on to defeat George W. Bush by nineteen points, capping off the most unlikely blowout in the history of the New Hampshire primary. Bauer, meanwhile, earned the support of 1,640 New Hampshire voters—good enough for just shy of 0.7 percent of the vote. Bisquick didn’t even offer him an endorsement deal.