To hear Daniels talk about the party’s challenge was to get some clarity on why establishment Republicans have been so dissatisfied with the candidates they actually have. What they want is what you might call a “channeler” — someone, like a Reagan or a Clinton, who won’t simply give voice to populist fury but who might channel it in a way that makes it palatable to a wider swath of voters, someone who can take the call for austerity in Washington and make it sound more like a high-minded reform movement (in the tradition of a Robert La Follette or even a Ross Perot) than like something you would expect to hear at a survivalists’ convention. They’re looking for a candidate who has the requisite charisma and the towering conservative credentials to persuade these new activists that the party has to be — and sound — pragmatic.

In some quarters, the search for that channeler may go on until every major elected Republican in America has politely said no, twice. Every few weeks, it seems, a new potential savior becomes the target of relentless pressure and speculation; most recently it was Christie, who despite having once suggested his own suicide as a means of ending such conjecture, made a spectacle earlier this month of seriously reconsidering his resistance, before again deciding to abstain. And yet, when you talk to establishment Republicans in Washington, most now seem, if not entirely enthralled with their choices, then at least resigned to them. National polls, which are often unreliable at this stage of a campaign, have shown a pronounced volatility in the field, with Herman Cain most recently surpassing Perry in some surveys. But most experienced Republicans still expect Romney and Perry to outlast their rivals. And in these two most likely nominees, insiders see the potential to remake the party’s image and to close its internal breach. The vexing question for Republicans is whether either man, Romney or Perry, has the capacity to do both things at once.

For the type of establishment Republican who merely endured the Bush years, there isn’t a lot to love about the prospect of a President Perry. A. B. Culvahouse, a former White House counsel to Reagan who is now the chairman of the giant law firm O’Melveny & Myers, told me that Perry’s style as a candidate reminds him of the tent revivalists who blew through town when he was a boy in East Tennessee.

While they roll their eyes privately at Perry’s coyote-killing-cowboy routine, a lot of the old guard — the “weak, tepid, milquetoast, establishment” Republicans, as Culvahouse wryly described himself to me — seem to view him as the best possible kind of Tea Party candidate, a far more desirable brand of populist than Bachmann or Palin. However much he may make a show of his disdain for Washington, Perry is nonetheless a three-term governor, and that makes him, at the very least, an honorary establishment type, the kind of guy with whom you can do business.

And yet there is a growing fear among Republicans that the things about Perry that might call to mind tent revivalism — the constant and overt religiosity, the naked appeal to popular resentment — won’t play well with independent voters and especially not with those who find it all too reminiscent of the last Republican president’s swaggering self-reliance. In a USA Today/Gallup poll in mid-September, 44 percent of voters said they were sure they wouldn’t vote for Perry — about the same percentage who ruled out Obama, and nine points higher than the percentage who definitely wouldn’t vote for Romney. And this was before Perry’s strangely garbled debate performance later in the month (and before it surfaced that he used to frequent a hunting ground affectionately known as “Niggerhead”).

At the same time, Romney, who’s supposed to be the establishment front-runner, incites no great passion on K Street and Capitol Hill, where he is regarded as a sort of well-designed political android. “Mitt Romney is a really smart, experienced guy, and he may well be exactly what you need as president right now,” Charlie Black told me. “He’s not a gregarious guy who’s easy to get to know.” Still, as summer turned to fall in Washington, discernible mostly by the slow disappearance of seersucker, the denizens of the Republican fund-raising circuit began tilting en masse toward Romney. There was a sense that the field was more or less settled, and that Romney, with his moderate pedigree and private-sector résumé, was the candidate most likely to win in pivotal Rust Belt states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. And if he wasn’t going to co-opt and transform the Tea Party movement in the way the establishment might have hoped, then at least he wasn’t going to recommend the hanging of Ben Bernanke or run around repeating the charge that Obama was a socialist — something he pointedly refused to do, at least outright, in the same debate in which Perry came unglued. If Perry’s entry had any net effect in Washington, it was to drive much of the establishment into Romney’s sterile but relatively benign embrace.

The chief dilemma here, though, is that the guy who may be best positioned to take the Republican message to the heart of the electorate may not be the guy who’s capable of holding his fractured party intact. Perry is probably the candidate who can unify the insider and outsider elements of the party, because he’s a natural fit for the Tea Party and can mollify the establishment by incorporating longtime Republicans into his campaign. A good precedent for this might be the 1980 campaign. Reagan was a hero to movement conservatives, but he also shrewdly managed to reassure a nervous establishment by selecting George H. W. Bush as his running mate and bringing into the fold respected senior aides like James Baker.