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After making a lot of money giving speeches and writing books, Gingrich may have become accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Certainly Callista was. In the early summer of 2011, just as the campaign was getting going, Gingrich took his wife on a Greek cruise. At about the same time, it came out that Gingrich had kept a line of credit of close to half a million dollars at Tiffany & Co. to buy gifts for his wife. Already frustrated, Gingrich’s top advisers were further exasperated when Callista refused to let her husband spend a full week campaigning in Iowa. “It’s not how you run a presidential campaign,” a former aide said. “You can’t do it as a day here and a day there—you’ve got to dedicate the time.” Advisers planned an intervention, a massive confrontation, with aides and advisers flying in from around the country. The message was that Gingrich was going to have to leave the campaign to the professionals and stop listening to Callista. He was going to have to spend more time in the early states—and stay overnight, which she wouldn’t like. He was going to have to downsize the campaign—“live off the land,” as an adviser put it—and stop giving in to her demands that he attend so many screenings of a Gingrich Productions movie that he had been promoting on the side. But this adviser decided that a big come-to-Jesus meeting could backfire. “He would get his back up,” the adviser said. So just a couple of aides met with Gingrich so he wouldn’t be put on the spot in front of a group—but he was incensed, anyway. The session was over in twenty minutes. Sam Dawson, the campaign’s strategist, called Rick Tyler, Gingrich’s spokesperson, on his cell phone to say everyone was quitting. “We’re done and the state teams have left,” Dawson said. Gingrich did not ask them to stay.

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Tim Pawlenty was in some ways an obvious choice: a genial, successful midwestern governor, an evangelical Christian with strong ties to the right. He comes across as “Minnesota nice.” Some say his wife, Mary, is the more forceful partner.

For campaign manager, Pawlenty hired a twenty-eight-year-old operative named Nick Ayers. The young Ayers insisted on total control. “His point of view was, If I come to you with advice, you will do what I say,” said a person who participated in the negotiations to hire him. One of Ayers’s first moves was to cut Mary Pawlenty out of scheduling decisions and debate preparation, leaving the candidate caught between his manager and his wife. She was especially upset when he took her off several campaign email chains. Headquarters staffers, particularly women, were not happy with Ayers. He would bark orders (“Move those calls!”) at the slightest scheduling mishap. One young woman was near tears after Ayers summoned her to his office to talk about “Medicare” and berated her for the next twenty minutes. Ayers accused her of telling a reporter that he had talked openly of the possibility that Michele Bachmann was taking “happy pills.” Ayers had made the “happy pills” remark about Bachmann in front of several staffers, and the woman has told colleagues she was not the leaker.

Pawlenty was not a scintillating campaigner, so advisers hired two “style coaches”: how to sit forward in the chair when being interviewed, how to hold his hands, how to speak more dynamically.

The coaching never quite took. He began shouting to show anger he didn’t really feel, and botched his best chance to attack his chief rival, Mitt Romney. The day before the second GOP debate in June 2011, Pawlenty had declared on Fox News, “President Obama said that he designed Obamacare after Romneycare and basically made it Obamneycare.” At the debate, an audience member asked Pawlenty about health care. Hoping for an onstage confrontation between Pawlenty and Romney, the moderator, CNN’s John King, kept trying to get Pawlenty to repeat his “Obamneycare” remark. Pawlenty whiffed at the chance, and the pundits immediately branded him as feckless.

What was going on in Pawlenty’s mind? In early October,