MANCHESTER, N.H. — Kelley Paul shrugged off the recent attacks on her husband from fellow Republicans — including John McCain, who called him “the worst candidate” — as just the “contact sport” of politics and vowed to reveal “another dimension” to Rand Paul as she hit the presidential campaign trail here for the first time yesterday.

“At this point, I really do say it’s politics … and politics is a contact sport,” Kelley Paul told the Herald in an exclusive interview. “It’s remarkable how thick your skin gets after awhile … I don’t pay that much attention to the political attacks. Anything personal does bother me more, obviously, because you feel like your reputation … is being attacked.”

Paul, campaigning by herself in New Hampshire through today, did admit to being apprehensive about the approaching media scrutiny over all aspects of her and husband’s life. The New York Times on Friday, for example, detailed the driving record of Marco Rubio’s wife, Jeanette.

“I don’t want to comment on anybody else’s particular situation, but that is exactly one of the things that every person in politics really has to look at, is that you live under a microscope and it can be intimidating, difficult, and you go into it with trepidation, for sure,” she said.

Paul, a former political consultant who once worked with now-GOP rival Ted Cruz, was at first reluctant about a White House campaign, telling Vogue in 2013: “Because in this day and age it’s mostly about character assassination.”

She told the Herald there was no single discussion the family had that convinced them to go for it.

“It was more of two years’ worth of conversations as he began to lay the groundwork,” she said. “It’s a daunting enterprise personally and as a family, so we debated all of that and really felt like we were ready and could do it.”

She sees her role as making sure voters see her husband as a “regular guy” and for now doesn’t plan to get involved on policy issues.

“I want his message to stand alone,” she said. “He’s the candidate. I see myself … just helping maintain our family sanity through all of this.”

She was back home in Kentucky over the weekend helping two of their three sons start summer jobs as pizza deliverymen and dealing with a leak and a broken air conditioner.

She said she hasn’t thought much about what kind of first lady she would be, but that both Michelle Obama and Jill Biden have done a “great job” and that she’d continue the outreach they’ve done to military families.

She’ll speak at a GOP women’s breakfast in Nashua today.