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seemed like an hour—could not remember the third (Energy, he later recalled). “Oops,” Perry said. In the spin room after the debate, Perry’s aides looked shell-shocked; there was no stopping a mud slide of bad press. Cleaning up after Perry had become an increasingly onerous task. In that rocky late October, Perry had seemed so incoherent that his host, Kevin Smith, director of the conservative group Cornerstone Action, had felt compelled to publicly deny that Perry had been drunk at the time.

The Romney camp was keeping an eye on Newt Gingrich. The former Speaker’s campaign had nearly collapsed over the summer amidst the stories about Callista and the Tiffany charge account as well as the mass exodus of his staff. Gingrich still had no ground operation to speak of, no armies of volunteers to knock on doors, and he had not raised much money for ad buys. He was regarded by the political pros as a hapless manager. (“From a policy perspective, I would probably agree with Newt on more things than any other person in the field,” said a former Haley Barbour adviser. “But, look, Newt would fuck up a two-car funeral procession.”) At his Iowa appearances, he sometimes seemed to be chattering in a different language than his workaday supporters. One of his staple proposals is applying the management fad “Lean Six Sigma” to the federal government, which can be a bit of a head-scratcher for rural audiences.

Still, Gingrich had impressed in the September-October debates, particularly the last two, in New Hampshire and in Nevada, by standing back and offering a Wise Man’s view of the political shenanigans onstage and in Washington generally. “Gingrich is the only person—if you watch the dial groups [voters recruited by pollsters to turn up a dial to express enthusiasm while watching a debate] and you look at the polling and you look at the focus groups and you look at the audience analysis that’s out there after the debates, Gingrich is the only guy up there who looks like a president other than Mitt,” said a Romney adviser. “The rest of them look like comedians.”

Gingrich was feeling pleased with his comeback when he spoke to us in mid-November. He acknowledged that his campaign had nearly sunk over the summer. Borrowing a comment he’d heard on CNN, he described himself as the Bruce Willis character in the movie The Sixth Sense: “I was the only guy in the room who didn’t know I was dead.” June and July, he said, had been “the two hardest months in my life. It was just excruciating.” After his staff quit en masse and the pundits mocked his trip to the Greek islands and his Tiffany expense account, “traditional money raising was almost impossible,” he said. “We went through two sets of finance people who just burned out because they couldn’t take the negatives.”

But he survived and created what he called “a substance-based, volunteer-centered, Internet-based system.” He boasted that he was inventing a revolutionary new model of campaigning. “I told somebody at one point, ‘This is like watching Walton or Kroc develop Walmart and McDonald’s.’ ” Gingrich turned over operations to his wife and her close friend from college Michael Krull. He credits Callista in part for his resurgence. “We privately discuss everything. She sees all the [email] traffic that matters,” he said. “She is very, very good at certain kinds of editing and she is very, very good at visuals. She is a very good surrogate. She is increasingly comfortable going out and talking and giving speeches and visiting with people.” The “closest analog” to his wife “is Nancy Reagan,” he said, in that “Nancy was extraordinarily close to Ronnie and that they discussed virtually everything.”

He scoffed at his former staffers who had put down his wife. “They were worried about Callista’s impact in South Carolina. I mean, to a degree that was absurd.” We asked what he meant. “Well, just being the younger wife that would turn people off, et cetera, et cetera, that people would do dirty tricks. And every time she goes out she is wildly received. Our volunteers are begging her to go