In Hollis, Bolduc took a lap around the crowd before he ascended the podium. He was happy and proud ("We did it!" he kept crying out to well-wishers) and had a good rah-rah energy. Standing a few feet from me, Bolduc, when presented with an infant, looked for a second as if he might kiss the baby but instead just pinched a cheek and cooed. At the podium, Bolduc said he still "hadn't gotten over the fact" that Haley asked him to address her as Nikki: "So I start off with 'Governor,' 'Ambassador,' to make myself feel comfortable." (Haley, off mike, graciously said: "Those were just moments in time!") When the general got down to business, he sounded as if he were working from an almost entirely different playbook than Haley's. "The Biden Administration, with the help of Senator Hassan, has undermined our values and principles in this great nation," Bolduc said. "They are taking God out of our communities, to the detriment of every one of our institutions. That is clear in the problems we have with our families, our religious institutions, our economy, our education system."

Bolduc's stump speech ran almost ten minutes, and by the end a plain truth had surfaced: he just wasn't very good at this. Bolduc barely touched on the economy, saying just that New Hampshire needed a senator who would "say 'hell no' to inflation," and, though he acknowledged the need to "reach the independents," he said that he planned to do so by stressing the issues that had won him the primary--a staunch Southern border, an opposition to wokeness in the military. This led him down a bizarre path. A new policy at West Point, Bolduc told the audience, held that cadets could "no longer call your mother 'Mom' or your father 'Dad'--you can just call them your 'parent' or your 'guardian.' " (The talking point likely stemmed from a Fox News "exclusive" about a diversity-and-inclusion training at the Air Force Academy.) Bolduc sensed a supportive ripple from the crowd, and leaned in. "Nobody's taking that title away from me!" he cried. "You're not gonna tell my grandchildren they can't call me Bubba! My sons, grown men--they still call their mother Momma!" I looked over at Haley, who was clapping and smiling supportively. What in the world were we doing?