But his greatest presidential stumbling block may be right under his nose. At home, Newt’s second wife, Marianne Ginther Gingrich, tells me she doesn’t see herself in the First Lady’s job. “Watching Hillary has just been a horrible experience,” commiserates Marianne. “Hillary sticking her neck out is not working.”

What happens if Newt runs?, I ask.

“He can’t do it without me,” she replies. “I told him if I’m not in agreement, fine, it’s easy” —she giggles at her naughtiness. “I just go on the air the next day, and I undermine everything…I don’t want him to be president and I don’t think he should be.”

Why not?

“Right now, the presidency is not a single person. It’s not so much what he’d be doing. It’s what I’d be doing.”…….

Newt, who avoided Vietnam with student and marriage deferments, resisted taking a job. During his college years, Newt called up his father and stepmother to ask for financial help. His stepmother, Marcella McPherson, can still hear his exact words: “I do not want to go to work. I want all my time for my studies…Bob Gingrich told me he will not help me one bit. So I wondered, would you people help me?” Big Newt began sending him monthly checks.

Dolores Adamson, Gingrich’s district administrator from 1978 to 1983, remembers, “Jackie put him all the way through school. All the way through the P.h.D…He didn’t work.” Adds Adamson, “Personal funds have never meant anything to him. He’s worse than a six-year-old trying to keep his bank balance…Jackie did that.”

When I ask Marianne if she keeps the checkbook for the man determined to balance the nation’s budget, she laughs quietly: “Yes, I do a lot of our finances…I pretty much handle the money.” She acknowledges that at the time of their marriage, in 1981, Newt was in great personal debt, “so we had to work our way out of it,” a feat she says was accomplished only last year.

Friends of Newt’s from graduate school recall a single-minded, achievement-oriented workhorse with a Nixonian level of social unease. Newt was, however, a mesmerizing presence —articulate, highly energized, driven by his quest, his dream. Yet even as early as Tulane, he seems to have assessed issues in purely political terms. Neither moralist nor ideologue, he was from the very beginning a pure pragmatist, an actor in the political theater, always honing his presentation.