I never ended up writing the story, in part because of the frustration of dealing with Paul’s disastrous communications staff, but largely because I lost faith in the premise. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, the limits of Paul’s pitch were obvious. I saw firsthand that what he was trying to pull off—remaking the GOP in his image—was going to be a lot harder than he assumed.

In Iowa, Paul held a press conference with a group of evangelical pastors and packed a GOP dinner in Cedar Rapids with a youthful, enthusiastic crowd. But when he devoted part of his speech to advocating immigration reform—“I am in favor of immigration reform,” he said. “If you want to work in this country, I’m in favor of finding a place for you to work”—the room went silent. (The following month, Paul would cast a vote against the comprehensive immigration-reform bill that passed the Senate.)

In New Hampshire, Paul and Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, met privately with a group of state GOP officials and liberty-movement activists—an attempt to mend the distrustful relationship between the two groups. Ron Paul supporters in a few states had taken over Republican delegations and staged a walkout from the 2012 convention; Rand Paul’s promise was that he could bring them back into the party fold. At that night’s GOP dinner, where Priebus and Paul were to give back-to-back speeches, vendors were selling T-shirts with the slogan “The Palatable Paul.” I chatted at the bar with a local GOP official who had come to regret his support for the war in Iraq.

Priebus devoted a section of his speech to blasting the attorney general at the time. “Let’s not forget it was Eric Holder reading the Miranda rights to the Christmas Day bomber,” he said angrily. “It was Eric Holder that said that he would read the legal rights to the dead body of Osama bin Laden. He said that it would be his living legacy to try the 9/11 terrorists in civilian courts.”

Speaking next, Paul told a story that seemed like an implicit rebuttal of Priebus. He had recently met a policeman who helped people at the scene of the Boston bombing, he said. “He had the same thought every one of us would have—anger, wanting to punish these people,” Paul said. “It’s human. It’s normal. But he said, ‘What separates us from them is that when we did finally capture him, we sent the suspect to a hospital. He’s going to be tried in a court of law. He’s going to have an attorney.’ It’s our Bill of Rights, it’s our law, it’s going through the process that makes us different from them.”

Again, there was no applause, and Paul moved on to telling jokes about Obamacare.

This was the basic problem that Paul’s presidential campaign never managed to solve: He was trying to perform a personality transplant on the Republican Party, and political parties just aren’t that easy to change.