CHAPTER 19

IN AUGUST 2015, MY wife and I were married in Whitefield at the Mountain View Grand Resort, a beautiful 150-year-old hotel. The place boasted New Hampshire’s oldest hand-operated elevator and had a distinct The Shining vibe. We had met on the campaign trail in New Hampshire four years earlier (where we were both covering a Jon Huntsman event at the Salem-Derry Elks Lodge). Although weather reports called for rain, it turned into the kind of sparkling summer evening you don’t allow yourself to hope for leading up to your wedding day. To ensure that the New Hampshire theme was thoroughly beaten to death, we even cajoled an initially reluctant Secretary of State Bill Gardner to break with decades of self-imposed wedding ceremony exile to preside as our justice of the peace.

I was excited to spend an extended weekend with friends and family in one of the most beautiful corners of the state without thinking one bit about the primary. And as Whitefield is a town of fewer than 2,500 people and is located in a rather inconvenient stretch of wilderness just north of the White Mountains, I was reasonably certain that I wouldn’t encounter anything that was directly related to the campaign. On a morning jog the day before the wedding, however, two of the three cars that I passed on the road were adorned with Carly Fiorina bumper stickers. “Huh,” I thought. “Maybe Fiorina’s really starting to resonate.”

The former Hewlett-Packard CEO’s profile had risen substantially since the previous month’s so-called kids’ table debate in Cleveland that featured all of the GOP presidential candidates who didn’t make the cut for the main event. Fiorina had thoroughly dominated the JV game, and her poll numbers had been rising a bit in New Hampshire. If the hard-to-reach denizens of Whitefield were leading indicators of how she was resonating in the hinterlands, maybe she was about to become a more significant factor in the race than anyone realized.

Or maybe not. When I got back to the hotel, a friend told me that she had run into Carly Fiorina in the gym that morning. It turned out she had held an event in the area on the previous day and had spent the night at the hotel. Carly-mentum in Whitefield had been confined to a couple of her own staffers’ vehicles, and I was reminded why it’s a very bad idea to read too much into anecdotal evidence.

In trying to assess the strength of a presidential candidate, just about the only method worse than assessing bumper-sticker sightings is to give serious consideration to the media narrative of the moment. As August turned to September, the new narrative on the Republican race was that Trump’s supporters were responding to his “authenticity.” What? There were a lot of adjectives I could think of to describe a man who would unflinchingly use words like “greatest,” “biggest,” and “best” to describe everything from his buildings to his bowel movements, but “authentic” wasn’t one of them.

To me, Trump’s appeal was pretty clear. He wasn’t authentic. He was just different than every politician who’d come before him. He said whatever the hell he wanted to say, whenever he wanted to say it, but not because he was authentic. Trump was skillful in his ability to deliver an entertaining if mindless performance for people who wanted to escape the drudgery and hardships in their own lives. Like any great illusionist, he knew how to make them believe that something much better was magically awaiting them just around the corner, if only they’d trust him.

In every presidential campaign in recent memory, voters have made abundantly clear that they detested Washington, but in the end, they’ve always turned to someone who pretty much embodies its prevailing ethos. But no presidential campaign preceding this one had ever featured a character so wildly over-the-top as Trump. At this point in the race—before he turned to inciting violence, as well as lying even more aggressively and regularly—Trump was still widely perceived in the broader media narrative as something of a novelty. In retrospect, that collective misjudgment was a big part of what ultimately allowed him to become so dangerous.

Another media narrative that proved equally flawed was the assumption that Jeb Bush would ultimately find a way to compete seriously for the nomination and should continue to be covered as a front-runner. There was simply no way that a candidate who boasted as many inherent advantages as Bush did could continue to languish far behind in the polls. With the arrival of September—that pivotal month when voters tend to “get serious,” according to unsubstantiated legend—the man with the most money to play with and the presidential pedigree to cull from would surely get another look. I believed it, too. The voters, it turned out, were unimpressed by this subjective assessment of how they would behave.

On the Thursday after Labor Day, I hit the road from New York City and drove five hours through a drenching rainstorm to a Jeb Bush town-hall event at an elementary school in Salem, New Hampshire, a Boston commuter town just across the Massachusetts border. There were about 150 people there—not a great turnout for a supposed front-runner at this point and downright miniscule by Sanders’s and Trump’s standards. The candidate was fine—reasonably engaging and sharp on policy—but the lack of energy in the room was noticeable. In his defense, Bush was justifiably preoccupied by the clock, with the Patriots set to take the field that night in Foxborough for the first game of their Super Bowl title defense. Even when he was talking about football, Bush sounded defeated. He admitted that he was a Dolphins fan, but he didn’t sound much like one. “Once again, we’ll get crushed by the Patriots—that’s our tradition, and we’ll stick to it, I’m sure,” the somewhat gloomy candidate predicted. “I actually went to high school with [Patriots head coach] Bill Belichick, and he was an incredibly smart kid. He’s the best coach in the NFL. And you’ve got the best quarterback.”

Bush stopped short of noting that former Dolphins star Dan Marino had never won a Super Bowl and didn’t point out that Patriots quarterback Tom Brady had an exceptionally beautiful wife, but his attempts to ingratiate himself with Patriots fans while denigrating his own team came across as a bit off-putting. Bush assured the crowd that he’d provide them a buffer before the 8:30 p.m. kickoff. “Gotta get in a brewski, too,” he said. “Don’t know about everyone else, but I do.” OK, so he drank beer. That was one agreeable way in which he was different from his older brother. But I saw no signs that this particular Bush, who was far less charismatic than the previous one, would do any better in New Hampshire.

That Saturday morning, I got out of bed at the Manchester Radisson and headed downstairs to retrieve my first cup of coffee of the day. I was greeted in the elevator by a man in his thirties dressed in a black mask who looked like Batman but wasn’t quite. “Morning,” he said as the elevator door closed behind us with a thud that sounded more emphatic than usual. I’m not normally inclined to verbally interact with anyone before ingesting caffeine, and I immediately began pulling out all the stops to avoid speaking a word to this particular gentleman. I gave him a friendly nod and looked him up and down. As much as I didn’t want to talk to him, it was too early for me to avoid staring at something like this. He could tell that I was impressed. “Wait until I get my armor on,” he said with the sigh of a man who had a long day of work ahead of him. “It weighs like seventy pounds.”

As I made my way to the parking lot, past throngs of adults who were lining up for Granite State Comic Con, some of them dressed in full robot suits and makeup that must have taken at least two hours to apply, it occurred to me that Donald Trump was running his campaign a bit like a comic-book superhero. It didn’t matter that almost none of what he said was based in reality. He’d created a world in which every aspect of American life was under attack from nefarious, shape-shifting evildoers. Fortunately, he, Donald Trump, was the only one who could save the day. With the stroke of a pen, he’d end the trade deals that sold out the common man; by sheer force of his will and strength, he’d build a magical wall to keep the grotesque Mexican hordes out; and he’d outflank the Chinese using his most famous superpower of all: his deal-making skills. This was a world that was easy for people to understand.

John Kasich, on the other hand, was most definitely not a superhero. A plain-vanilla Ohioan (albeit with an infamous temper), Kasich built his political career on his reputation as a no-frills Midwesterner who knows how to get the job done and doesn’t have time to deal with any of the nonsense, OK? Kasich also had a distinct oddball side—the kind that only people who are supremely comfortable in their own skin are willing to show off in public. Kasich liked to play the role of life coach, and in spite of his penchant for snapping at people who displeased him, he often came across as supremely human in a profession where that quality can be glaringly absent. The most notable thing that happened during Kasich’s brief run for president in 2000 took place one morning in Amherst, New Hampshire, where a woman who was planning a house party for the then Ohio congressman later in the day, accidentally ran over and killed her dog while backing out of her driveway. It must have been horrible, but the woman held the event anyway, and when it ended, Kasich grabbed a shovel and helped dig the unfortunate canine’s grave. Suffice it to say that you wouldn’t see Donald Trump doing something like that.

I wanted to catch Kasich’s speech at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, where he was addressing a regional college Republicans conference. When I entered the main ballroom a few minutes before the Ohio governor was slated to begin his remarks, I spotted my friend Robert Draper, who was working on a profile of Kasich for the New York Times Magazine and had flown in with Kasich from Columbus that morning. I started catching up with Draper when a slightly built, middle-aged man in a black polo shirt, black slacks, and chunky black shoes stepped in front of us. At first glance, he looked like a golf pro or a lawnmower salesman from Tampa. He stood there for a moment, admiring the historic New Hampshire primary photographs that adorned the wall, and I turned my attention back to Draper.

“Have you two met?” Draper asked, signaling to me that I should approach the man who was dressed to revel in the weekend to its fullest extent. Now I figured that the stranger was perhaps a facilities manager at the school whom Draper had gotten to know—or maybe a mid-level campaign staffer. But as I got a closer look at his face, it suddenly dawned on me in a flash of embarrassment that I was looking at John Kasich himself. As I shook hands with him, the candidate flashed a sly smile that seemed to confirm the strange joy that he took in being aggressively anonymous.

Like Lindsey Graham, Kasich was focused almost entirely on New Hampshire, and with a senior staff led by John McCain 2000 veteran John Weaver, his model was clear. Unlike Graham, however, Kasich was actually making some inroads. In addition to his frequent visits to the state after declaring his candidacy in July, an aligned super PAC spent $5 million on a summer advertising blitz at a time when the Ohio governor had the airwaves almost entirely to himself, as the other candidates conserved resources. The early efforts to introduce Kasich were paying dividends, as he had broken into the double digits in some recent polls, besting such better-known candidates as Bush and Marco Rubio.

Why was he starting to resonate? In short, Kasich refused to be anything but himself. He was sanctimonious, goofy, capable, snippy, thoughtful, patronizing, and smart—sometimes all at the same time. And he didn’t sugarcoat anything. During this particular address to the college Republicans, for instance, he talked about how his own mom and dad had been killed by a drunk driver and how a friend of his in Columbus had recently found her son dead in their basement, a victim of a drug overdose. “I look at religion as a foundation from which I can build my life,” he said. “Because there’s no solace when the big things come that aren’t great.” The anecdote didn’t match the mood of the young audience on a nice late-summer day. That Kasich didn’t particularly care was central to his appeal and his ultimate limitations as a candidate.

As authentically religious as he was, Kasich was far from a Ted Cruz or Ben Carson–style Bible-banger. Almost in the same breath as he spoke about his own faith, Kasich praised as equally valid a secular humanist’s desire to change the world for the better. He also waxed poetic about why doctors, PhDs, and wealthy people sometimes end up joining terrorist groups because of the universal human desire to find meaning in life. “I would maintain that you do not find happiness searching for happiness,” he said. “You find happiness and satisfaction when you live a life bigger than yourself.” The whole thing was like a therapy session, and that was exactly how Kasich ran his campaign every day.

When he finally got around to reciting his own résumé—the tax cuts and economic expansion in Ohio, as well as the leading role he had played as House budget chairman in balancing the federal budget in 1997, I remembered that Kasich was, in fact, trying to get these people to vote for him, not purchase his self-help book. But without saying so directly, for that would sound way too much like a typical politician, he was conveying with his every fiber that his campaign was not about him—a sentiment that politicians often express but rarely mean. He didn’t have to wear a baseball cap with a slogan to tell people that he was going to Make America Great Again. Kasich was putting to the test the idea that voters would discover on their own that he was capable of doing just that. It didn’t seem like a great bet to me, but it was certainly interesting. “You’ll have a great time if you help us—I promise you that,” Kasich said before closing out his remarkably soft pitch with a bold, kind of obnoxious, prediction that was in keeping with his inimitable self-assuredness. “And guess what else?” he added. “I kind of think I’m going to become president.”

Kasich’s next event was a town-hall meeting inside a middle-school classroom in Raymond, fifteen miles east of Manchester. Just before it was set to begin, the candidate, still dressed in his casual weekend attire, pulled up a chair among the few dozen people who had turned out, as if he were there as a spectator. As he later told it to the crowd, most of whom initially recognized him about as well as I had earlier in the day in Manchester, he leaned into the ear of the woman sitting next to him and said with cynical dismissiveness, “I hear the guy’s really boring.”

That’s the kind of person John Kasich was: weird but refreshing in that he truly did not give a shit about trying to impress anyone. He was only trying to please himself, and at that, he usually succeeded. After an introductory speaker listed some of his achievements in government, Kasich jumped up from his seat in the crowd and immediately recounted the oddball shtick he had just performed for his own benefit. “Did you know it was me?” he asked the woman who’d been sitting next to him. She hadn’t. “Yeah, so much fun,” he added.

At a time when it appeared that the Republican presidential campaign might reach Peak Insanity at any moment, Kasich oozed with rationality. He talked about how he believed unequivocally that humans contributed to climate change, for example, and made clear that he did not want to engage in “nation building” on the international stage. “I may not be pounding the desk and all this flash and dash, ripping into Obama,” Kasich said, fully embracing his role as the Reasonable Republican—an archetype that has had many variants over the years in New Hampshire presidential politics. “That’s not why I’m doing this. I want to fix the country.”

One of Kasich’s fundamental problems was that for every compelling point he made, he’d let fly a throwaway line that would come across as completely off-putting. “Who doesn’t exercise?” he asked his audience in Raymond, scanning the room to see what fat slobs might raise their hands. “Why aren’t you exercising?” he then scolded no one in particular. During the Q-and-A session, a college-aged woman asked Kasich about his plan for promoting clean energy. Her question was reasonable and well-articulated, but Kasich dismissed it as if she’d asked him about time travel. “The problem is, young lady, you can’t just make things happen,” he said.

I cringed. “Young lady” wasn’t exactly the preferred nomenclature for college-aged women in the second decade of the twenty-first century. I later heard that on the ride to the next event, one of Kasich’s young staffers gently chided the candidate for talking to this New Hampshire primary voter as if she were his fifteen-year-old daughter who had been caught staying out past her curfew. This, to me, seemed to be the most imposing hazard for Kasich’s candidacy—not his relative anonymity or center-right inclinations, but rather his tendency to come off as a sermonizing old-fogy-in-training, liable to dispense a homily at any moment.

That afternoon, Kasich and Carly Fiorina were both slated to speak at Scamman Farm in Stratham. With its bales of hay, corn maze, and pumpkin patch, the farm looked more like it belonged in Iowa than New Hampshire. The owners of the place—former state House Speaker Doug Scamman and his wife, Stella, a former state representative—have been fixtures of the local Republican scene for about as long as anyone could remember. And as it had for decades, the American Gothic–style backdrop that their property boasted made for a particularly pretty picture on sunny days like this one. George W. Bush had drawn thousands of people at the Scammans’ property in his 2000 and 2004 campaigns, and the farm’s most recent claim to fame was that it was the site that Mitt Romney’s campaign chose to launch his second presidential bid in June 2011.

In an apparent attempt to convey the impression that he was actually running for president and not trying to sell them a new sprinkler, Kasich had changed out of his short-sleeved golf shirt into a far more civilized button-down and slacks. Whiffs of not-very-spicy chili fit for the typical New Hampshirite palate permeated the air, as Kasich took to a makeshift stage that was about three feet long and three feet wide in front of an oversized-American-flag-adorned barn. His stream-of-consciousness stump speech was unmemorable, but what happened next was not.

Doug Scamman, who was serving as the event’s emcee, first announced to the crowd that the Seacoast Republican Women had invited all of the GOP presidential candidates to the event, though only three of them had accepted. Then he said this: “The next person I’m going to introduce was not invited, as far as I know, but many of you probably know Joe Sandman [sic]. He’s at the MSNBC Morning Joe show. So it gives me a great deal of pleasure to introduce Joe Scarborough.”

The crowd clapped hesitantly, as the self-possessed cable news host and former Republican congressman—clearly annoyed at having been introduced as something of a party crasher—took the stage. “Well, of all the introductions I’ve ever had, that was the most interesting because I guarantee you I would not be here today if I were not invited,” Scarborough said. “I would be with my children back in Connecticut enduring high taxes and maybe even cooler weather.” OK, then.

Scarborough went on to explain that he had made the trip to “vouch” for Kasich, his former colleague in the US Congress, though he stopped short of endorsing him formally. Just in case anyone was wondering—and it was unclear that anyone was—Scarborough assured the crowd that he himself wasn’t running for president. It dawned on me, however, that we were in an environment in which it was entirely feasible for a politician-turned-TV-commentator to decide on a whim that he was going to announce a presidential bid. Mike Huckabee had done just that a couple of months earlier. And Scarborough, after all, had served almost six years in the US Congress—almost six years more experience in office than Donald Trump, Ben Carson, or Carly Fiorina had under their belts. He was as unflappable and charismatic as any of the candidates other than Trump, and wasn’t that just about all you needed to be successful on the presidential stage these days?

After Scarborough finished up his speech on Kasich’s behalf, Fiorina arrived on site, decked out in her New Hampshire every-gal uniform: a flannel shirt with the requisite American flag pin, faded jeans, and cowboy boots. In her normal life outside of the campaign trail, Fiorina, who boasted a net worth of about $60 million, would be about as likely to attend a chili cook-off on a farm in New Hampshire as she would an Insane Clown Posse concert. But Fiorina had built her business career on her skill as a salesperson, and she was more adept than many of the career politicians in the race at selling her image to great effect. Sure enough, “She wears cowboy boots!” was what one woman shouted to her friend after getting an up-close glimpse at the lone female Republican candidate’s footwear. “I like her even more now.”

Fiorina’s stump speech was as harsh, unyielding, and meticulously scripted as Kasich’s was freewheeling and conversational. She spoke without notes, but it was almost as if you could see the prewritten attacks on an imaginary page in front of her, as she hit Hillary Clinton for her “lies” and Donald Trump—carefully avoiding any mention of his name—for equating leadership effectiveness “with how big your helicopter is.” The crowd ate it up.

“Now there’s a line,” one woman in the crowd next to me cooed.

“It’s perfect,” another acclaimed.

A third woman just stood there with her mouth ajar, unable to convey in words the rapturous feeling that she was apparently experiencing from watching the stone-faced Fiorina lay into her opponents one by one. “She just—” the woman said, shaking her head in awe, unable to finish the thought.

As it turned out, I was witnessing Peak Fiorina—the pinnacle of her popularity in the race. It was nonetheless impressive that she’d managed to elbow her way into the realm of viability at all. Frankly, I found her appeal as a presidential candidate entirely baffling. There was no doubt that Fiorina knew how to give a speech and would shine even brighter in the upcoming debate when she would share a stage with ten less rhetorically gifted men. But this was a woman who, by most accounts, was notable in the business world because of the unusually high level of ineptitude she had brought to the corner office at Hewlett-Packard. In that position, she’d carried out a merger with Compaq in 2001 that went about as well for HP as the decision to sell Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees had for the Boston Red Sox. After her subsequent move to lay off 30,000 employees did nothing to stem the tide of the company’s growing misfortunes, Fiorina was fired in 2005, but not without the nice little parting gift of a $21 million golden parachute. For her second act, Fiorina ran for a US Senate seat in California in 2010, losing by double digits to incumbent democrat Barbara Boxer. So naturally, her next move was to run for president of the United States. The idea of seeking the world’s most powerful office on the heels of being fired from one job and failing to win another would strike most people as a bit presumptuous (yet just look at how far the seemingly ridiculous candidacy of Donald Trump had already gotten). Here was Fiorina, running somewhat successfully for the nation’s highest office, once again as an “outsider”—a claim she could make only because of her failure to win her first political race. What a country.

On this particular day, however, it seemed like I was the only one on hand who felt this way. The crowd was in the mood for a fight, and Fiorina was bringing it. They cheered every time she mentioned “Benghazi,” “e-mails,” and “lies,” saving their biggest reaction for when she asked them to “admit that in your hearts of hearts, every one of you wants to see me debate Hillary Clinton.” Fiorina knew how to hit the crowd with a buzzword barrage every bit as well as Trump did. And that skill, more than any line on her résumé, was what mattered to these Republican voters—most of them women—who flocked to her in droves.

After Fiorina spoke, well-wishers lined up to greet her, many of them dressed in bright-red “Team Carly” T-shirts. “We’re going to come down and help you,” promised one woman from Maine, who attended the event with her ninety-nine-year-old friend. “Cancel everything and put her in the White House today.”

Even Joe Scarborough, who was there to support Kasich, appeared to offer Fiorina some encouragement. That, at least, is what it looked like he was doing when he leaned in closely to whisper some unknown wisdom into her ear, cameras all around to capture the cinematic moment. Just about the only New Hampshire Republican at the event who wasn’t ready to anoint her as a major threat to Hillary Clinton’s chances was the delightfully cranky John H. Sununu, who was on hand to hawk copies of his new book, The Quiet Man—about George H. W. Bush’s presidency.

“Hey, Carly,” the unimpressed former governor shouted as the candidate passed by his booth. “Have you read the book? It teaches you how to be president!”

Nothing tops off a chili cook-off quite like a barbecue-and-beer bash, and so Kasich and Fiorina headed next to the Strafford County Republicans–hosted outdoor gathering just down the road in Dover. The official sanctioning of alcohol inevitably inserts a wild card in any political event, particularly one that takes place on a Saturday evening on a nice late-summer day. Fiorina, however, did not change her tenor—not one bit—to match the mood of this well-lubricated crowd. In fact, she delivered her lines almost word for word and dramatic pause for dramatic pause. Political professionals call this “message discipline.” I call it “soul-sucking.”

After Fiorina completed this latest performance of her script, the candidate’s traveling press secretary announced that she would be doing a short media “gaggle,” another word for an “avail,” in which the assembled press would be allowed to ask her questions. Unsurprisingly, most of the subsequent queries contained the word “Trump”—an obvious source of frustration for Fiorina, who noted with exasperation that none of the voters she had encountered throughout the day had asked her about the front-runner. That wasn’t true. I’d actually heard firsthand more than one voter in Stratham offering her encouragement for fending off Trump’s misogynistic attacks. Still, it offered Fiorina a nice opportunity to play the role of sanctimonious media critic. “You should really think about that,” she admonished the assembled press, as if she were trying to do them a favor. In her most self-righteous moments, I’d noticed that Fiorina had a tendency to swivel her head in an abrupt, circular motion, as though she were trying to keep an invisible hula hoop in orbit around her neck. She was doing that as she chastised us for focusing so much on Trump.

Fiorina’s contemptuous posturing was making the mood miserable, but then Lindsey Graham arrived, and everything changed in an instant. He wasn’t holding a big glass of red wine this time, but the South Carolina senator was accompanied by an even more invigorating social lubricant: John McCain. In typical fashion, the Arizona senator regaled well-wishers with his usual cocktail of friendly banter, Irish jokes, and faintly uncomfortable references to acquaintances who “just returned from the Betty Ford Clinic.” Although he’d heard all of the gags hundreds of times before, no one laughed harder than his sidekick, Graham. The political Laurel and Hardy made their way on foot through the parking lot, huge smiles on each of their faces, as old friends from previous campaigns mostly surged past Graham toward the two-time primary New Hampshire primary winner, whom they called, “John.”

Invariably, whenever the focus remained on him for too long, the dutiful McCain tried to change the subject. “Meet Lindsey Graham—he’s a fellow veteran!” he told each of them, eager to pass the attention onto the man who was actually a candidate in 2016. In spite of his noble efforts, it couldn’t have been clearer that he still relished his own role as honorary New Hampshire candidate-for-life. Peter Hamby, the head of news at Snapchat, asked McCain to record a ten-second video message for the popular millennial-centric app. The Arizona senator didn’t flinch in accepting the challenge. “The geezer is here again, this time to support Lindsey Graham,” he said in perfect social-media rhythm.

After they took the stage together, McCain kept his introductory remarks short, and Graham’s stump speech was what it always was: filled with charming, lighthearted jokes and calls for bloody combat on the international stage. “The more you drink, the better I sound!” Graham said correctly and to much laughter, right before the part about how we need to send ground troops back into Iraq. Graham may have been going nowhere in this race, but McCain was happy to come along for the ride, even as he remained realistic. “He’s getting better every time,” was all that McCain could muster after the speech, when someone asked him how he thought Graham was doing in New Hampshire.

When the event concluded, the two made their way back to the parking lot slowly, greeting McCain’s old friends one at a time. I happened to be standing next to Ben Carson’s wife, Candy, who was representing her husband at the event, when she asked an aide, “Where’s Lindsey Graham?”

The aide pointed him out. “He’s in the red,” he told her.

An embarrassed expression suddenly passed over Mrs. Carson’s face. “Oh, God,” she said. “I saw him before, and I didn’t know who he was.”