“I’m running because I want to change the old order,” he told me. “They are the old order.”

Gingrich talks this way a lot now. If you’re a skeptic, or maybe a realist, you might note that Gingrich doesn’t make for the most persuasive outsider, having once been the top elected Republican in the country and having advised just about every leading Republican since. “When I come to Washington” is a phrase Gingrich sometimes uses when talking to voters about his hypothetical presidency, even though he has been in Washington for more than 30 years, most recently operating from the offices of his own small empire on K Street. If Gingrich is in fact elected next November, he could probably walk his own boxes over to the White House.

You might also be tempted to point out that Gingrich doesn’t seem to be leading a populist wave so much as getting swept up in one, that he’s really just the latest in a string of Not-Romneys — Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain — to be temporarily buoyed and then dashed on the rocks. Next week, it might be Ron Paul, or Rick Santorum, or even Buddy Roemer, who’s apparently still running. If this seems self-evident to you, though, it is not so to Gingrich. As he sees it, the current of history has been carrying him toward this moment, or something like it, for many years. And what do a few negative ads and falling poll numbers mean in the face of that? He rejects the word “destiny” (“I carry a sense of fate, not destiny,” he said during our breakfast), but call it what you will, Gingrich believes his time is now.

Back in early 2009, right around the time that Barack Obama was sworn in as president and staggered Republicans were casting about for direction, I asked John Podesta, President Clinton’s last chief of staff and a highly regarded Democratic strategist, who would emerge to fill the vacuum of leadership in the Republican Party. Without hesitation, Podesta said he could answer that in two words: Newt Gingrich. No other Republican, he said, had Newt’s ability to seize an opening and frame an argument in ways that people could understand.

A couple of months later I wrote an article for this magazine about Newt’s ascendance, again, within his party. It was during those sprawling conversations that Gingrich, already mulling a presidential run, talked at length about the theories of Arnold Toynbee, the British political scientist who wrote “A Study of History.” In particular, Gingrich was taken by the Toynbeean concept of “departure and return,” the notion of great leaders leaving or being cast out of their realms, only to roar back triumphantly when the historical moment summoned them. Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan — all are idols to Gingrich, men who were humiliated or exiled and then returned as heroes. (Reagan never withdrew from public life quite like the other two, but as Gingrich sees it, Reagan’s career seemed all but over after he didn’t win the nomination in 1976.) In his years after resigning the speakership in 1998, Gingrich came to believe that he, too, was gathering strength for a return. “I’ve had the time to actually think about what you would do if you wanted to profoundly reset the country,” Gingrich told me in Iowa.

There is an unmistakable theme of departure and return in his campaign as well, because just about everyone had written him off as irrelevant by Labor Day. Gingrich sounds rueful when he thinks back to the pounding he took during his first week as a candidate, when he got into trouble with conservatives for criticizing the entitlement-reform plan offered by his friend Paul Ryan. “It was the excuse to go after me,” he told me. “So everybody said, ‘Oh, good, he’s bleeding, let’s see if we can’t kill him.’ And that’s what was the real revelation to me, is that people I really thought were personal friends all cheerfully engaged in the lynching. And a lot of them of course now have a vested interest in my not winning, because of how silly they’ll all look.”