Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
Newt Gingrich visited the Medical University of South Carolina Children's Hospital in Charleston, S.C., on Friday.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — If Newt Gingrich soars on his strong debate performances this week, overcomes the blowback within his party from attacking Mitt Romney as a corporate buyout king, and goes on to do well when South Carolina voters go to the polls on Saturday, one political strategist will get both blame for the stumbles and credit for successes: Mr. Gingrich himself.
Openly disdainful of professional political operatives, Mr. Gingrich employs almost none of them after a mass exodus of aides in June nearly derailed his candidacy. Asked in a debate here Thursday night to name one thing he might undo about his campaign, he said, “I would skip the opening three months where I hired regular consultants.”
Instead, Mr. Gingrich makes nearly all the key strategic decisions by himself, and in a manner befitting his personality — spontaneously, thinking aloud, often voicing a half-formed idea in full public view before committing to it.
His political instincts are much like everything else about him: brilliant at times, befuddling and exasperating at others.
“In politics, you say something, and it has to be correct the first time and everyone has to be 100 percent behind it or else it’s going to face criticism,” said R. C. Hammond, the spokesman for the Gingrich campaign, describing what he said was the conventional way of running a presidential campaign.
Mr. Gingrich “doesn’t operate that way,” Mr. Hammond said. “It’s O.K. to say an idea and have it be criticized because in this process there’s going to be an improvement.”
Much of the political world was baffled when Mr. Gingrich attacked Mr. Romney for his stewardship of the private equity firm Bain Capital. It was a decision Mr. Gingrich made on his own. “We have daily strategy calls,” one of his top aides said. “There was zero, zip strategy discussion about Bain. This is the way his mind operates.”
He has an inner circle of 8 to 10 confidants, with whom he holds regular conference calls and participates in long e-mail chains — “like teenagers texting but with something to say,” said the aide, speaking last weekend on condition of anonymity to discuss the campaign.
But he is just as likely to take the advice of an ordinary voter as he is his loose brain trust.
Adam Waldek, Mr. Gingrich’s 26-year-old state director in South Carolina, said he was astonished a few years ago when Mr. Gingrich asked — and listened to — his opinion of how he had done in a radio interview. “He turns everyone around him into an adviser,” Mr. Waldek said.
But others who have worked with Mr. Gingrich said he had trouble executing his vision.
“There was a breakdown that had to do with his inability to process information beyond his own predispositions and his own ego,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican representative from Minnesota, who in the 1990s worked with Mr. Gingrich on returning their party to power in the House.
“We’d get up every morning, we’re like an army marching in a different direction and people never could understand why,” said Mr. Weber, who now supports Mr. Romney.
Over a handful of days in Iowa before the Jan. 3 caucuses, Mr. Gingrich first vowed to “stay focused on positive things,” then said the all-positive campaign was an “experiment,” then allowed he would sharply contrast his record with Mr. Romney’s but not go negative. En route to a humiliating fourth-place finish after a rain of attack ads by a “super PAC” supporting Mr. Romney, Mr. Gingrich said yes when asked on caucus day if he thought that his rival was a liar, saying he would to go after him “every day.”
Then Mr. Gingrich began criticizing Bain takeovers that “basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers.”
By the time he boarded a charter jet to South Carolina after a bruising fourth in the New Hampshire primary, Mr. Gingrich seemed to be on a personal mission against Mr. Romney as the embodiment of corrupt Wall Street bankers.
Celebrated among close friends for his ability to recount movies in epic detail, Mr. Gingrich regaled a group on the flight with a scene from the 1949 classic “All the King’s Men.” It is the story of a self-made country lawyer, played by Broderick Crawford, who defies the corrupt men in “striped pants” to run as a populist for governor. “Now listen to me, you hicks,” he shouts in a speech. “They fooled you 1,000 times just like they fooled me. But this time I’m going to fool somebody. I’m going to stay in this race.”
By the time Mr. Gingrich made his first appearance after the flight, in Rock Hill, S.C., he thundered, “We have a right to know what happened when companies go bankrupt,” referring to deals in which Bain supposedly laid off workers and extracted profits from companies that later failed.
But the populist attacks drew a furious response from leading Republicans, who said Mr. Gingrich sounded like a left-wing enemy of free enterprise. Mr. Romney responded that companies he invested in had created more than 100,000 jobs on balance.
Some aides began to sense a serious mistake. In Spartanburg, Mr. Gingrich’s penchant for spontaneity had him agreeing with an audience member who pleaded with him to “lay off” the critique of capitalism.
Mr. Hammond had to issue a hurried denial that Mr. Gingrich was shifting strategy.
The chain of events exposed a campaign cycling through repeated shifts in strategy as it sought an effective counter to the bruising attacks of Mr. Romney’s super PAC, which portrayed Mr. Gingrich as a Washington influence-peddler.
“This is not where Newt wanted to be; it’s worse than confusing,” said the top aide. “The one place Newt Gingrich doesn’t want to be is playing defense. He’s allowed himself to react, and if you’re reacting, by definition you’re on your heels.”
At a forum in Charleston led by Mike Huckabee on Saturday, Mr. Gingrich was booed when he said he would campaign the next day in Georgetown, S.C., home to a steel mill that Bain acquired and that later went bankrupt.
“There are people beseeching him to get back where he’s best, which is bold ideas, humor, channeling his inner Reagan,” the aide said.
And Mr. Gingrich seemed to adjust his strategy. He gave a speech in Georgetown, but he never brought up the connection. Nor did he mention Bain the next day. But on Tuesday, when asked to explain his critique of Mr. Romney’s deals to a group of business executives, Mr. Gingrich rose to the bait like a hungry trout.
“The Bain model is to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain an immense amount of money and leave,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I think that’s exploitation.”
The campaign’s chief strategist had called a new direction, at least for a day.
