CHAPTER 31

IT’S PROBABLY A FOOL’S errand to attempt to highlight just one particular moment in the primary’s history as being emblematic of its very essence. But on one weekend in mid-November 2007, everything came to a head for the quintessential New Hampshire candidate. The setting was befitting of a nineteenth-century Russian novel or perhaps a castle in the forest in a Grimm brothers fairy tale—an ideal venue for John McCain. Since he had become a fixture in the state more than eight years earlier, the Arizona senator had favored the isolated New Hampshire locales that fed his romantic spirit, so the Balsams Grand Resort Hotel was right up his alley.

Darkness had long since fallen over Dixville Notch, as the season’s first snowflakes descended upon the late-fall landscape. Inside the great hotel’s dining room, not all that much had changed since the place opened in 1875. As a small group of reporters sat around the banquet table with the candidate for a three-course meal, bow-tied waiters filled and refilled wine glasses to try to keep up with the flowing conversation. As was usually the case with McCain, the dinner was entirely on the record. It was an almost unheard-of allowance to the fourth estate, especially with alcohol on the table, at a time when the fast-acting virtual quicksand then known as “the blogosphere” had ensured that any ill-conceived, off-the-cuff remark from a presidential hopeful would become national news within hours. McCain wasn’t worried about any of that. He was a candidate with nothing to lose—he had been acting like one, at least.

After the wine-infused members of the press had, once again, run out of questions to ask him, the candidate retreated to the historic Ballot Room, where the traditional midnight vote was held. Neil Tillotson, who had regaled McCain with his story of meeting Teddy Roosevelt eight years earlier, had since passed away. But all current seventeen Dixville Notch voters were there to see the former fighter pilot make his case for the 2008 primary. And that’s exactly what he did, with the focus and intensity of someone speaking to 17,000 people instead of seventeen, taking every one of the voters’ questions. That night, the candidate rested easily with the knowledge that he’d won over another handful of New Hampshire primary voters.

With the Thanksgiving holiday approaching and the fresh snowfall making travel difficult, McCain and his staff decided to stay an extra day at the Balsams, at the end of which McCain presided over a more intimate dinner in a quiet corner of the grand dining room with a small group of New Hampshire aides, influential supporters, and close friends. Everyone at the table was buoyed by the momentum that McCain had started to generate, yet most of them saw one major problem that would continue to hold him back: Iraq. For months, he had been promoting and defending President Bush’s troop surge—a last-ditch effort to turn the tide of the war against the insurgency. The plan was extremely unpopular with the American public at the time, about two-thirds disapproving Bush’s handling of the war. But McCain was unequivocally on board with the surge. Two months earlier, when the cash-strapped candidate had launched his “No Surrender” bus tour, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart suggested that a more appropriate moniker might be “John McCain’s Traveling House of Stubbornness.”

The No Surrender tour had garnered some desperately needed media attention but not much movement in the polls. The act of supporting anything having to do with Bush and Iraq remained a toxic posture, even for many Republican voters who were growing tired of a war that appeared to be increasingly unwinnable. At some of his town-hall events around the state, McCain attracted more protesters than he did participants.

Some of the candidate’s confidants at the dinner weren’t much more optimistic about the surge’s prospects than the general public was. As the snow continued to fall outside the Balsams, Steve Duprey and former New Hampshire congressman Chuck Douglas led the charge to try to get McCain to reconsider his position on the surge. Not only were they concerned, like most of the country was, that Iraq was already lost. They also believed that even if the surge did work, the effects of any military success wouldn’t be felt politically by the time the January primary rolled around. Everyone at the table was just looking out for his best interests, they explained. He had to at least stop talking about it so much. “People are sick and tired of Iraq,” one of his advisers said, summing up the consensus view in the room.

McCain listened quietly until all the people present had added everything they intended to say. And then he took his turn to weigh in. “Look, I believe the surge is right,” he said. “And if I can’t convince the people of New Hampshire the surge is right, I shouldn’t be president. I’d rather lose a campaign than lose a war.”

They never attempted to change his mind again.

It was August in the desert, but on this particular Thursday, the thermostat was expected to top off at a merciful 97°F—practically New Hampshire–like conditions compared to the highs of 107°F and 108°F that were in the Phoenix-area forecast for later in the week. Shortly before 10:00 a.m., I joined about two hundred Humana Pharmacy employees who were seated in neat rows inside a sterile conference room at their company headquarters in Glendale. Moments before the guest of honor was to arrive, a company representative stood at the front of the room and asked the younger-skewing crowd to stand and clap when he entered—a somewhat desperate plea that you’d rarely if ever see at a New Hampshire political event but one that was not out of place in the context of the low-octane Arizona primary. Although the employees obeyed the decree, there were few signs of sincere enthusiasm when John McCain entered the room, dressed in a crisp suit and tie. The candidate, who was seeking his sixth Senate term, nonetheless appeared in good spirits just a couple of weeks shy of his eightieth birthday.

“After I ran for president, I slept like a baby,” McCain said by way of warming up the staid, heavily air-conditioned room. “Slept two hours, woke up, cried.”

The line killed, as it always did. It was vintage McCain: wry, self-deprecating, a little bit dark, and considerably well worn. After making one of his patented off-key Betty Ford Clinic jokes, McCain next tried out the one about how he’d begun his career all the way back in the Coolidge administration before segueing into the yarn about the Irish twins who got so drunk together at a bar in Boston that they failed to recognize each other. Then there was the one about the two prisoners in Illinois. “One says, ‘The food was better in here when you were governor.’” The crowd now on his side, the jokes kept coming, as McCain offered a memorably lighthearted response to a man who thanked him for his military service in Vietnam. “By the way, it doesn’t take a lot of talent to get shot down,” he said. “I’m one of those for whom the number of landings doesn’t match the number of takeoffs.”

It was McCain’s distinct way of disarming in the most charming way imaginable Donald Trump’s witless criticism of his war record in Vietnam. As I sat in the back corner, the only print reporter in the room, I was impressed by the performance. The man was still giving it his all. In a sense, he had to. McCain’s 2016 bid was not exactly going seamlessly. His November faceoff against Democratic congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick was still almost three months away. By necessity, McCain remained focused for the time being on fending off a less serious but still menacing GOP primary challenge from Kelli Ward, a former state senator and avowed Donald Trump acolyte, who dabbled in wondering open speculation about the chances that the soon-to-be octogenarian senator might die in office. For McCain’s part, fending off Ward while preparing to face Kirkpatrick meant walking a shaky political tightrope. On the one hand, he’d have to try to find a way to maintain the maverick image that had been central to his identity and recognize the extent to which Hispanics—a critical voting bloc in Arizona—would rally against Trump in a year when the Democratic presidential nominee was vying seriously to win the state for the first time in two decades. Meanwhile, McCain needed to avoid turning off the rank-and-file Republican voters who supported the unlikely 2016 GOP presidential nominee. It was perhaps the most difficult balancing act of McCain’s political career. True to form, the candidate made clear that he was in on the joke. “If there’s anyone here who can predict this election, please raise your hand because I sure as hell can’t,” McCain said. Then his voice lowered into a barely distinguishable mutter, as he looked down at his feet. “I just know we’re going to make America great again, and it’s going to be huge,” he mumbled.

He was being sarcastic, of course, but his frustration over Trump’s successful takeover of the party that the Arizona senator himself had led eight years earlier was palpable. I took it as a given that McCain harbored abject contempt for Trump. And yet, he was still supporting him, albeit as halfheartedly as humanly possible. In so doing, however, McCain risked openly abandoning his reputation for being a man of unbending principle, no matter the political cost. It was an aura that had been solidified during his two New Hampshire primary campaigns, even as it was rightly challenged in other contexts. Why, I wondered, would he want to jeopardize the esteemed status that he had worked so hard to build for the sake of winning the dubious prize of getting to spend another six years in Washington?

Here in Arizona, he still had an audience, both for his jokes and for his speeches that lambasted President Obama over health-care reform and foreign policy, but there was very little of the give-and-take that he loved so much about campaigning in New Hampshire. After opening up the floor “to any questions or comments or insults you might have,” McCain took just two questions from the crowd—a measly allowance that would have been an inconceivable slight during either of his New Hampshire primary campaigns. But it wasn’t that he wanted to cut the event short. It was just that only two people had raised their hands to query the candidate. This was Glendale, after all, not Goffstown, and this particular audience had to get back to work. Their bosses, no doubt, had little desire for them to waste the afternoon engaging in any kind of prolonged political discussion.

Back in New York the following week, I received a call one morning from McCain, who was traveling between campaign events in Arizona. His disdainful rendering of how Trump was going to “make America great again” was still fresh in my mind. Even if Trump didn’t win in November, I asked, did McCain fear that Trump had effectively killed the New Hampshire primary? By winning the primary and using that victory as a springboard to the nomination, had this nakedly opportunistic purveyor of grievance and nutty conspiracy theories proven that New Hampshire isn’t really so special after all? No, McCain answered right away, explaining that he viewed the 2016 Republican New Hampshire primary results as an aberration, laying the blame squarely at the feet of the people who once composed his base: the media—cable news commentators, in particular.

“Obviously, Trump turned the standard procedure of political campaigning on its head,” McCain said. “I think you cannot overstate the importance of the media love-in with him. Many of them, like Morning Joe, who now have turned completely against him, gave him millions of dollars of free airtime. You couldn’t purchase the airtime he got with sixteen or seventeen opponents, sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, while Morning Joe Scarborough and others slobbered all over him every single morning and every night. I just don’t see that happening in the future. I think that in 2020, we will go back.”

Even though he was at the moment in the middle of his tough campaign in Arizona, true to form, McCain was eager to reflect on his past triumphs in New Hampshire. I asked him if he believed there truly was something unique about the character of the Granite State voter. “I do,” McCain said without hesitation. “I think it is a deep awareness of the importance of their individual vote that then leads them to view their decision with utmost seriousness.”

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,” he added quickly, as he went into the joke about Mo Udall campaigning in New Hampshire (“What do you think about Mo Udall for president?” “I don’t know, I’ve only met him twice.”). In spite of his directive, I didn’t stop him. Neither did I stop him when he began to tell me the story about his visit to Dixville Notch during the 2000 campaign, when Neil Tillotson told him that a run-in with Teddy, not Franklin Roosevelt, had been his most memorable personal encounter with a presidential candidate. The sheer joy he got from retelling that one was more than enough to justify having to listen to the familiar yarn again. John McCain just could not get enough of talking about New Hampshire.

With just a few moments remaining before he had to get off the phone and head into his next event, I asked McCain one final question: What would he say to those who argued that the first-in-the-nation primary was outdated—a once-vibrant institution whose utility has faded in a new era of national politics? Did he think that the calls to change the nominating system had at least some merit?

No, he did not. “There are certain traditions in American politics that kind of define the American process, and New Hampshire plays that unique role,” McCain said, his tone remaining wistful. “Without New Hampshire, it would change dramatically the whole face of American politics, and I think money would play a much greater role. And I’m not sure that’s good for American politics.”