CHAPTER 21

SINCE VOTERS STARTED SELECTING candidates directly, no Republican or Democratic presidential nominee has finished worse than second place in the New Hampshire primary. By 2016, however, even the primary’s most spirited defenders had to concede an inconvenient fact: since 1992, no New Hampshire primary victor had gone on to win the presidency. The most common rebuttal to charges of New Hampshire’s fading relevance was that the primary’s real value is not in predicting who would become president but rather in “winnowing the field.” It was a fair point. But in order to keep its good name in that regard, I believed strongly, New Hampshire’s voters would have to do something about making sure that Ben Carson didn’t get anywhere near the silver medal in the 2016 primary.

Carson had earned his own page in the annals of conservative folklore after dressing down President Obama at a National Prayer Breakfast in 2013. His up-from-nothing life story was so compelling, his credentials as a world-renowned brain surgeon so unimpeachable, and his demeanor so unassuming that his instant appeal as a candidate in the year of the outsider was self-evident. But upon spending some time with him on the trail and actually listening carefully to what he was saying, my conclusion became inescapable: the idea of a “President Ben Carson” was disturbing enough to lose sleep over, no matter how remote the possibility.

At first blush, many of Carson’s more unhinged pronouncements about basic scientific principles sounded suspiciously like cynical attempts to mitigate his own rarefied professional accomplishments, as part of an effort to appeal to the more academically modest crowd that composed his political base. No Yale-educated director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins could really believe, as Carson had stated, that the big bang theory was a “fairy tale” concocted by “highfalutin scientists” or that Darwin’s theory of evolution was a clever trick perpetuated by “the adversary” (Carson’s highfalutin term for the Devil). No student of American history could really believe that Obamacare was “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery,” as Carson had declared it. No presidential candidate of sound mind could earnestly be concerned, as Carson had said he was, that impending national anarchy might prevent the 2016 election from taking place at all. Carson apparently did believe all of these things, which is why he kept outdoing his own rhetoric, even as some of his advisers at times appeared to be conducting public interventions to get him to stop. Carson seemed like a nice guy, but he was objectively out to lunch. And for months, that was A-ok with a large swath of Republican primary voters, who elevated the nutty brain surgeon into second place in the national polls.

After spending some time with him in New Hampshire, I started to realize the full extent to which Carson’s paranoid know-nothing act wasn’t an act at all. I’d long found that some of the smartest people I knew were also the most eccentric. But at this level of politics, I’d never seen real-deal madness quite like Carson offered. I caught up with him on the last day of September, when he had three events scheduled around the seacoast region. He had been in the race officially for five months but previously had made only a couple of trips to New Hampshire. On the way up through southern New England and into New Hampshire, I had to drive through an inundating rainstorm, which turned out to be an appropriate setup for the apocalyptical pronouncements to which I would soon be subjected.

When I arrived at Carson’s first event of the day in Exeter, I sought reprieve from the elements under my cherished oversized umbrella—the kind that tends to catch passersby in the face when used on a crowded sidewalk—and still, I was soaked. Standing in a damp shirt, wet pants, and flooded shoes, I arrived inside the crowded retirement facility’s ballroom just after Carson had taken the stage and begun his lecture. As I stood in the back of the room, I had to strain to hear what he was saying, even though he was speaking into a microphone. The average audience member’s age appeared to be well into the seventies, and there was a lot of wincing and headshaking going on in the back rows from people who couldn’t hear a word he was saying. The emcee who had introduced the candidate picked up on this dynamic and butted in to ask Carson to hold the microphone closer to his mouth. “I couldn’t get it any higher,” the candidate replied in his peculiar near-whisper. “It’d be in my mouth.”

Carson spoke with a particular kind of inflection that sounded a bit like a late-career Michael Jackson telling a particularly terrifying ghost story. I knew that he was a subdued man with a calm, physician’s bearing, which had contrasted so nicely in the debates with the monster-truck rally in human form that was Donald Trump. Still, it was fascinating to see how lethargic Carson actually was in a room. I only had to wait about five minutes, however, before he doled out his first Nazi reference of the day. For Ben Carson, the compulsion to compare just about everything to Hitler’s Germany was like hiccupping: once he got started, it was hard for him to stop. He’d gotten into trouble for this tendency many times before, but he wasn’t going to change just because the politically correct crowd wasn’t willing to acknowledge the Nazi-like menace that confronted the United States of America in 2016.

“You know, I think back to Nazi Germany,” Carson said, earning my sudden and undivided attention. “And I know the P.C. police say you’re not supposed to say, ‘Nazi Germany,’ but I’m saying it anyway because I don’t care what they say.”

The P.C. police put in their place and Carson’s rhetorical bravery now firmly established, he was ready to go full-Führer. “In Nazi Germany, a lot of those people did not believe in what Hitler was doing,” Carson continued. “But did they speak up? No. They kept their mouths shut, and they kept their heads down, and look what happened.”

The crowd sat in silence. Carson wasn’t done. “And some people say, ‘Oh, nothing like that could ever happen in America,’” the man who would go on to become one of Donald Trump’s most active surrogates said. “I beg to differ.”

Carson’s lack of self-awareness was so intense, his intellectual dishonesty so thorough, that he had no problem criticizing politicians who throw rhetorical “hand grenades,” while in the same breath warning that the stock market crash, which helped lead to the Great Depression in 1929, would be a “walk in the park” compared to the economic collapse that was impending, if the United States did not return to the gold standard. After the inimitable prophet of doom wrapped up his mild-mannered soliloquy on the impending annihilation of everything that was good in the world, I approached Sandra McKay—an undecided independent voter who lived at the retirement facility. When I asked her what she thought of Carson, she seemed to be struggling to find a way to sound polite when discussing the very nice crazy man who’d come to ask for her vote. “He’s very certain of what’s going on, and I don’t know if he has any reason to be that certain,” she said. “I love his [personal] story… but I don’t know.” That was reassuring to hear, at least.

At the media avail following his speech, I decided to press Carson to elaborate on his view that people who kept their mouths shut in the United States might soon find themselves unknowingly paving the way for the Fourth Reich. He didn’t back down an inch, turning the tables on me, as if I had been the unreasonable one for asking the question.

“I mean, if people don’t speak up for what they believe, then other people will change things without them having a voice,” Carson replied.

“What does that have to do with Nazi Germany?” I asked.

“Well,” Carson said matter-of-factly. “Hitler changed things there, and nobody protested. Nobody provided any opposition to him, and that’s what facilitated his rise.”

Yes, I supposed that it was true that “Hitler changed things” and that some people in the United States today also wanted to “change things,” but it didn’t take a brain surgeon to realize this argument was the equivalent of contending that because fire trucks and apples both are red, fire trucks and apples are essentially the same thing. Just for kicks, I asked Carson who in America today was most like Hitler. The implied answer, of course, was President Obama. I didn’t expect him to say it, but I wanted to see if he might come close.

“I’m not going to go into that,” Carson said, showing the restraint of a burglar who has stolen everything in the house but decided to leave the carpet intact. “I think the example is pretty clear.”

Actually, the example wasn’t clear at all. It was absurd, and so was the idea that this man—who was a member of the medical team that performed the first-ever successful separation of twins conjoined at the head—could actually believe what he was saying. But he did seem to believe it. That was made clearer when Carson’s own campaign manager that week told ABC News that he was trying to wean the candidate off his penchant to equate everything that was bad with history’s most infamous regime. It was the kind of public intervention that you just didn’t ever see a campaign staffer make on behalf of a candidate (again, this was months before Trump’s daily antics ratcheted up the lunacy dial to eleven). Yet if Carson really was spinning out of control, his poll numbers hadn’t started to fall. There could be no doubt that a significant portion of Republican primary voters really liked the subdued brand of apocalyptic Hitler Tourette’s that Carson was offering them. To me, it was both illuminating and scary.

The Nazi babble wasn’t even the most memorable part of Carson’s press conference. That particular highlight didn’t come until the last question, when Carson—who looked as though he might fall asleep at any moment—was asked what he would do as president, in order to address Tropical Storm Joaquin, a weather disturbance that was at the time menacing the East Coast of the United States.

Now here was the kind of question that any two-bit candidate would be able to answer without the slightest problem. Try it yourself. If you were in Carson’s position, what would you say about how you’d prepare the country for a hurricane? Maybe you’d call the governors of threatened states. Perhaps you’d check in with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to get an assessment of how it was preparing for the storm. Or perhaps you’d merely “monitor the situation closely.” That would be a fine answer, too!

Here’s what Carson said: “Uh, I don’t know.” And then he smiled just a little, giggled, and made his way for the exit. Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States!

Later in the afternoon, Carson more or less repeated his screwball stump speech during an appearance at the cavernous Huddleston Hall Ballroom at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. The crowd there, however, was not as skeptical as the one at the retirement facility had been. These were Carson’s people, and there were a lot of them. I counted about 300 who had made it inside the room and another 150 or so who were blocked from entering by fire regulations.

The highlight of this particular event came during the very first question of the Q-and-A portion of the festivities when an older man near the stage rose from his seat. “Doctor Carson,” he said. “I can’t believe the amount of things that you and I agree on, and I think that you probably recall that you and I had a short talk in Washington on Saturday. And I’m in the health-care field, and the reason why I’m running for president along with you is I’m an outsider, too.”

Oh, good! Someone who was off his rocker as much as Carson! It only got more entertaining from there, as this other presidential candidate in the room identified himself as a “private investigator for over thirty years, investigating wrongdoing in Washington” and began talking about nuclear power and nefarious plots in a manner that was impossible to follow. Many of the Carson faithful began groaning as the incoherent rambling continued. I was loving it. This sort of thing happened not infrequently in New Hampshire, and it’s the reason most campaigns assign staffers to hold the microphones up to people in the audience, rather than handing them over, so that they can be taken away at any moment. But this particular gentleman had full control over his voice amplification device, and he was going to use it to full effect. The only thing that could stop him now was Carson himself, and just about any other candidate in this situation would have tried to pivot away from the lunacy as quickly as possible, while disavowing himself from it. Not Ben Carson.

“I’m happy to hear all of the things you have to say,” Carson told the man. A kindred spirit!

After the event, Carson didn’t spend more than a minute or two glad-handing inside the hall. His popularity rested largely on his best-selling books and cable-news hits, and he wasn’t exactly a grind-it-out-one-handshake-at-a-time kind of candidate. But once he made it outside, the scene was one of minimally controlled chaos. There were the usual for-profit autograph seekers with their baseballs at the ready for the semi-celebrity candidate to sign, but most of the dozens of people who surrounded Carson as he made his way to the SUV parked on the street were dyed-in-the-wool believers. “There goes the next president of the United States,” one man in a black windbreaker shouted. He was indeed talking about Ben Carson.

“I hope so,” the woman next to him replied. “I just worry so much about all the negativity in Washington.”

That’s right. Her solution for ending the negativity in Washington was a man who’d just stopped a half-step short of calling his political opponents Nazis.

“It can’t get any worse,” the man said.

That night, Carson held a meet-and-greet with some fellow physicians at The Red Door just outside of Portsmouth—a snug, old meeting place on a small island connected to the mainland by a bridge. The venue was the kind of creaky New England meetinghouse where you could easily imagine disheveled revolutionaries hatching plans to take on the redcoats over candlelit pints of strong ale. When I arrived, a big pot of clam chowder was heating on the stove, as local doctors and their spouses stood in the expansive meeting-room area discussing more contemporary topics than King George III, such as whether the football-playing Patriots’ tendency to try to run up the score against their opponents might soon backfire.

At this point in the evening, Carson looked as though he might fall asleep at any moment, but in fairness to the man whose appeal as a potential commander in chief continued to escape me, he sounded much more well-versed in foreign policy than he had during the debates. Carson elucidated the differences between the various Kurdish factions, for instance, in the manner of a man whose professional training required mastery of the art of memorization. He even offered up some charm in the form of a revealing moment of self-deprecation when he told his fellow medical professionals on hand that as a young child, he had dreamed of becoming a missionary physician and traveling to some of the world’s poorest places, “until I turned thirteen and decided I’d rather be rich.”

That line got some knowing laughs from the doctors in the room, some of whom had probably experienced a similar realization themselves. Carson also received big applause when he boasted that his training as a physician would help him make “decisions based on evidence versus ideology.” I thought back to all of the intensely ideological drivel that Carson had been espousing throughout the day and had to admire the guy’s chutzpah. Was this the new reality in New Hampshire? To the most audacious and delusional go the rewards? Ben Carson and Donald Trump were at that moment the top two Republican contenders in the state.

The next morning, I pondered the ramifications of Carson’s staying power at Popovers on the Square in Portsmouth—a casual-dining institution set among the quaint Irish gift shops and wood-paneled bars and restaurants of New Hampshire’s most charming small city. If you’ve never had a popover, I recommend you put this book down right away and get on the road to Portsmouth. Why they’re not more readily available around the country, I can’t tell you. I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but suffice it to say that the popover combines all of the best attributes of the croissant, the muffin, and the scone. Served warm and flaky, directly out of the oven, this particular popover was the best I’d ever had. I could have eaten three more of them, but I still had Dr. Carson on my mind, and I worried that if he found out, I’d be giving him permission to add “a Hermann Göring–like tendency to overindulge in desserts” to his grievances against the liberal media.

So instead of ordering more popovers, I decided to feel the Bern. In an ascent that surprised just about everyone, including himself, the Vermont senator hadn’t just caught up with Hillary Clinton, he had overtaken her in most of the New Hampshire polls conducted since August. That he was connecting with voters was now indisputable, but I wondered whether his campaign infrastructure had caught up with this unexpected groundswell. I knew that the Sanders campaign had recently expanded its footprint across the state, as part of an effort to provide some structure that would help the insurgent candidate sustain his charge. I searched online and found the street address for Sanders’s relatively new Portsmouth campaign office. Once again, I dropped by unannounced and found that the place looked like a typical regional campaign outpost. It was located at the very end of an industrial park next to an active construction site and had Bernie signs plastered across the window, but although it was midmorning on a weekday, all of the lights were off. I knocked a couple of times.

No answer.

I knocked louder.

Still nothing.

Halfheartedly, I tried the door handle. It was unlocked.

Not sure what else to do, I walked right into the Portsmouth field office of the new front-runner to win the first Democratic presidential primary of 2016.

“Hello?”

There didn’t appear to be anyone in there. Just to be sure, I walked into a second room behind the foyer. “Anybody home?” I shouted, as if I were a character in a lame horror movie who was seconds from being murdered.

Silence. I peeked into a third room, where several cell phones and a laptop rested on a table—all containing, no doubt, a trove of confidential information about the campaign. As I exited the building, I tried to imagine Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire staffers offering a similar opportunity to trespassers who might have had more nefarious intentions than I did. I couldn’t do it. The Sanders campaign, for all of its efforts to expand into a well-oiled machine, was still just winging it—a bunch of democratic socialists who couldn’t be bothered to lock the front door, and it didn’t matter. Sanders was winning in New Hampshire, and Clinton was powerless to turn the tide. Considering the extent of her apparent invulnerability a few months before, it was a bit hard to believe. But all she could do now was try to mitigate what was looking increasingly like a severe embarrassment in the state that had rescued her husband’s White House hopes a quarter-century earlier.