Chris Christie was so late that Scott Brown was ready to pack up and go home.
Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey and a notoriously tardy campaigner, was due at a restaurant in New Hampshire at 2.45pm the day before the midterm elections to stump for party candidates including Brown, who faces the US senator Jeanne Shaheen.
Almost 40 minutes later, there was still no sign of him. Brown had already handed out paper plates of apple pie and given his speech. Elderly diners had all the photographs with him that they needed. Aides were exchanging despairing glances. One drew an imaginary dagger across his neck. “I guess he didn’t make it,” sighed Senator Kelly Ayotte.
Brown headed back to his campaign bus. Was he disappointed by the no-show? “Yeah,” he told the Guardian. “Chris is a great man, but this isn’t going to be won by surrogates. It’s going to be won by taking our message right to the voters.”
Just then, a heaving swarm of people came charging across the other side of the parking lot with an unmistakable figure at its centre. “It’s Christie!” one supporter shouted. Brown stepped back from the door to the bus and returned to the restaurant, wearing a wan smile.
“We apologise for being late,” Christie, with wife Mary Pat at his side, told a thinned-out crowd once he was installed behind the serving counter. “We got some delayed air traffic out of New Jersey this morning and it has set us back all day.” Brown nodded gently. “It’s all good man, it’s all good,” he said. “We’re glad you’re here,” said Ayotte.
Despite having already been to Michigan and Rhode Island on Monday, Christie was chipper. On a bright, chilly day in a tiny town of 4,400 people, he wore a zipped-up dark blue fleece with his name and title on one side of his chest, and “Jersey Fresh – As Fresh As Fresh Gets” on the other. People congratulated him on his recent weight loss. Brown wore the stonewashed jeans and a sky-blue fleece that have become a fixture of his final days of campaigning.
Christie told Republican supporters to make sure that they sent Brown to join Ayotte in Washington by helping him defeat Shaheen. The two are practically tied in polls. “There is not a candidate in this country who has worked harder than Scott Brown,” said Christie. Then he walked a circuit of the restaurant being told that he should run for president in 2016.
“I’m thinking about it,” Christie told all who asked, repeating his now-familiar line. But Audrey Botnik, 71, was unsatisfied. “Yes, you’re running, there’s no decision,” she said. “You guys have made the decision for me?” Christie asked. “Well, that’s all right. Another burden off me.”
Christie displayed the crucial candidate’s skill of enthusiastically seeming to understand the obscure life connection that a voter has waited hours to explain during their five-second grip-and-grin. “How’s your daughter doing at Notre Dame? I’m the one who has a son who’s a friend of Father Scully’s,” one woman told him. “Yes!” Christie replied, after a pause.
An elderly gentleman told Christie that he lived in a house in the governor’s home town of Mendham, New Jersey, with “the beautiful Christmas tree”. Christie replied: “Yes! That’s your place?” Several others said they, too, were from his state. “Are you guys all lost?” he asked.
Before the special guests arrived, all eyes had been on the Browns. Gail Huff, the candidate’s wife and a retired broadcaster, was doing a brisk trade at the counter. “Blueberry! Who wants blueberry pie?” she shouted. “Pumpkin! Pumpkin pie!” Brown declined to tuck in. “I just had five slices of pizza at Village Pizza, so I’m a little full,” he said, stretching and placing both hands on his middle. “I should have stopped at three.”
After Janet Jones, 84, told Brown that she loved him, he sat down in one of the packed restaurant’s booths and patted his lap, inviting her to sit down. Jones roared with laughter. Huff took up the invitation instead, eating cherry pie while Brown hugged her. Their 26-year-old daughter Ayla, a 6ft former American Idol contestant who has been handing out her CDs at campaign stops, was called upon to sing the national anthem. Brown told supporters that they had “29 hours to change the direction of this country”.
But then Christie crashed in. He told reporters that this year’s campaign treadmill of “raising a lot of money, having to travel, and all that” would help him and Mary Pat decide whether he should indeed make a run for the White House. However, he claimed: “I tell ya, we have not had the time – I know people don’t believe this – but we have not had the time, or been together enough, to talk about it in any kind of serious way. But we will.”
He signed baseballs, photographs and copies of Time magazine. Then, just 22 minutes after he had arrived, he was back in his limousine, bound for another campaign stop in Connecticut. “I don’t have any ability to get tired at this point,” he said.
