CONCORD, N.H. — New Hampshire’s commitment to political kitsch and sincerity is no put-in. It carries its traditions like the first Jews carried the ark. You are not required to file for president in person, until the final day, when you are. If you pass the buck, you miss a guided tour of the secretary of state’s tiny offices, a sign-in book with every other candidate’s signature, and a near-mandatory sit-down with New Hampshire reporters. (Reporters from out of state are welcome, part of what this whole primary’s for, but you only sit down at the table if you have a 603 number.)
I went to see this just once this year, on Friday, when Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips entered the race. I didn’t stay for Vermin Supreme, the perennial candidate who plays the role that the Monster Raving Loony Party plays in Britain — to goof around and lose. I shared a ride with Vermin once, after (not immediately, not in a getaway car) watching him yell into a megaphone outside of a restaurant where Rick Santorum was talking to an illegally-large crowd. “Come out with your pants down and your hands up,” said Vermin; this unsettled me at the time, and still does, but it got the crowd going.
Nothing like that this week. The first day of a presidential campaign, unless it’s truly cursed, is light and curious; most of us have barely met this guy, and you don’t get to know anyone if you skip all small talk and start riddling them with accountability questions. That part comes next, after the candidate plays The Replacements after signing his name on a page under Donald Trump’s.
I’d flown to Boston, not Manchester, to save time on the trip’s front end; my rental was an electric Kia Niro. There is no worse way to drive an electric car than to and from an airport, with no guarantee of a charging station in between and definitely not eight free hours to complete a charge. There is no worse city to drive around, in traffic, in the dark that’s harder to see through as you age, than Boston. Boston is built for people, not cars, meaning it’s a real bastard to drive.
My colleague Shelby took the trip to Las Vegas, which we’d tagged-team last year; she mentioned on Friday night that Mike Pence might drop out soon and she nailed it. Pence, whose campaign depended on a massive, well-timed, and unexpected shift in how Republicans viewed Donald Trump, was doomed. It was, dramaturgically, the most interesting Republican campaign. No candidate worked harder in person than Pence; none had more relevant experience to be president. Nearly everyone in his audiences had voted for him, twice; few showed up, and many of them told reporters they had a nice team meeting someone they would never vote for.
I don’t know where that’s going, but I know where Mike Pence went, and am not done with that story. Sticking on the press’s role — of the candidates who started the race already known to most Republican voters, Pence dealt the most with press, and relied on it the most for earned media. (DeSantis has caught up but started with Christina Pushaw’s ethos of bypassing the media; Trump, Haley, and Scott have been choosy about who they talk to, giving their most important reactions to TV networks, not the producers in the back of the VFW hall.
Pence did the sort of thing that screenwriters used to pine for: Run on gut, ignore the safe advice. In the b-movie, behavior bends the electorate in his direction, and for Donald Trump in 2016, it worked. It did not work for Pence, whose political approach was set in aspic 10 years ago: He joked with hecklers, made bold announcements to grab a news cycle, put policy documents out that anyone could read and argue with. (They’re meant for you to argue with them; more earned media.) All of this was doomed because Pence hadn’t gone along with advice to overturn the 2020 election, and there has been no escaping that for any candidate running after the attempt or any reporter covering this stuff.
A campaign detail I’d tell people, surprising them, was that Pence couldn’t build crowds. A candidate in high demand can stage his own events; people will find them and come to them, every confirmation email building the campaign’s list. A candidate trying to introduce himself shows up at Pizza Ranches and baseball games and meets people one on one. Maybe a story spreads — did you hear about ol’ Mike Pence, flipping a coin at the Bluejays/Trojans game? Adam Wren wrote the definitive Pence obit story a week before the inevitable happened.
Back to the rental car. The idea of an electric car makes perfect sense to me, and would work just splendidly for people who aren’t me. Charge overnight and drive around all day? Perfect — the car as an iPhone. Even the slowest home charger probably does what you need.
Outside the home, the charger supply is unpredictable. (Is this interesting? One of my 2020 regrets, definitely the littlest one, was not writing a quick story about what it was like to fly on a plane in April, when no one was flying. Something banal can be diverting light-ent, so I’m just chancing it.) There are a few gently competing networks of stations that sprang up over the last few years; ChargePoint, EVGo, Shell ReCharge. There is a far superior network of “superchargers” by Tesla; I haven’t been on one of Elon Musk’s rockets, but this is far and away the best thing he’s done, brilliant enough to make me understand why a mayor or governor would nod along to his hyperloop pitch. Superchargers were made to work with Teslas — the first one I rented lifted the cap when the charging plug approached, plastic rising like a charmed snake. Clunkier systems were made to work with Tesla’s rivals, which have been making otherwise solid cars for middle-class business travelers/salary man commuters/etc. Each charging company offers an app that will let you see the nearness and kW output of their machines, with a tally of how many stations are open at that moment. Here’s a problem: The tally can be wrong. I typed all that to say that I navigated to a speedy 60 kW station in a Back Bay parking garage only to find three electric volkswagen already juicing.
But I did get back, and we made the party we’d promised not to miss — a friend’s 40th birthday, everyone encouraged to wear some “80’s” clothing, which I took to mean neon and Pit Vipers and a Video Archives shirt and my wife took to mean “like Billy Crystal in ‘When Harry Met Sally.’” (One friend mistook her as Amy Grant, which worked for the party theme.) We were in Delaware, so we ate real Italian hoagies with chopped peppers, then a homemade cake baked to recreate the taste of a hostess cupcake — a flavor you crave no matter how long you get off sugar.
Here’s the rest of my week. If I haven’t been too subtle, you’ve detected some regret in my pop culture rundowns. For the last year or so, I’ve dismissively referred to the books, music, and movies available to me as “pleasure island.” Too much leisure, too much indulgence — remember the beer and cigars — turns you into a donkey. It’s gotten easy not to waste time, plunking around on YouTube videos that don’t tell me anything. But reading is not really good for you, and people like me, who get an endorphin rush when we realize there are a few hours to read quietly and no one interrupting it, are simply less healthy than the people who find this boring and go play pick-up basketball. I’ve programmed the junk instinct out of my head and don’t feel the need to click on the abysmal stuff Google and Meta serve all day; see below.
But the long-term goal is losing the desire to buy books I find interesting. We’re a ways off — I’m just thinking, I need to get there.
The Best Thing I Watched: Going to be predictable: We saw “Killers of the Flower Moon" and nothing topped it. The people getting furious about the history Scorsese adapted, and how unflattering it is as an American metaphor, are not wrong — go ahead and make the angry reaction videos! There’s a scene here where an Osage looks around her family at an important life event and sees mostly white people; the original great replacement. It is two hours of hardcore sociopathy and then a police story that puts FBI agents up, unquestionably, as good guys.
Didn’t watch much else. Enjoyed the Wes Anderson short “Poison,” one of the four Dahl adaptations he filmed for Netflix, all with the same challenging structure of stories told by the actors who act them. Got completely confused by “Loki,” which at this point is an endurance test for its fine cast — who can do the most exposition without passing out. Surprised myself by enjoying “Rick and Morty,” which was getting less interesting and more lore- and shock-oriented even before Justin Roiland was forced out of it. This last episode had a concept I honestly hadn’t seen before: An accident pulps the brains of Rick (the genius scientist who you’re aware of even if you only know this show from T-shirts) and Jerry (his dipshit son-in-law, voiced by Chris Parnell, the most pathetic member of the main cast). They are reconstructed all wrong, parts of each man ending up in each head, one genius and one mediocre dad who will proudly tell people about the deal he got at Kohl’s. I suppose “The Fly” relied on this concept, but horrible things happened when Seth Brundle spliced with an insect; Rick and Jerry just become the sort of gun-running best friends you see in John Woo movies. I watch so few shows, it’s nice when one comes back from a slump.
The Best Thing I Read: “Romney: A Reckoning” by McKay Coppins, which he really was born and trained to write. I met McKay when he was the only Mormon reporter covering the Romney 2012 campaign for a big outlet (BuzzFeed), and while he has a generous soul, I recognized the contempt he felt when smug non-theists indulged the idea that Romney’s religion was hopelessly weird and when Gail Collins refused to stop writing about Seamus the dog.
I read Graham Linehan’s “Tough Crowd,” too, which a lot of people won’t touch, because Linehan submarined his comedy writing career while convalescing from testicular cancer treatment. He tweeted what he thought of the trans rights movement. You can read any number of profiles about what happened next, or you can read his memoir, which makes a hard turn, in subject and tone, halfway through.
The first half, though, is a funny and relatable story — relatable if you, too, learned comedy from “The Simpsons” and lost yourself in book stores and briefly wrote about music while wondering why anyone talked to you. My only gripe with this section is the one every writer wants; that there should have been more of it. Linehan recalls how Paul Schrader treated him with the disrespect he earned, but what happened? He remembers hazing colleagues by sending them to interview Van Morrison, but what did their endurance tests sound like? (Watch any interview with Van if you have five minutes; an interviewer is trained not to fill blank spaces with talk and nobody, not even Jerry Lewis, has made this harder.) The story of how Linehan’s masterworks were made is touched with a little bitterness, about the Oxbridge competitors who make hit shows for themselves, but I remember the good times.
The Best Thing I Heard: This.