DES MOINES — Ann Romney switches off shrill TV coverage of the presidential race “all the time.” She is exasperated by the hyperpartisanship of the moment. As for the debates? “Listen,” she said in a rare interview here, “I don’t even want to go to the debates.”

But with her husband’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination suddenly endangered by Newt Gingrich, Mrs. Romney is being deployed with a growing sense of urgency to do what her husband has been unwilling or unable to do this election season: offer voters a compelling, three-dimensional portrait of Mitt Romney.

As the Romney campaign has tried to regain ground, Mrs. Romney, 62, has appeared, over the last week, at four events in Iowa, New Hampshire and Washington, offering what she calls “the other side of Mitt that you never hear about.”

In the process, she is drawing attention to a potentially powerful asset in a race against the twice-divorced Mr. Gingrich, especially in conservative states like Iowa: the Romneys’ unblemished marriage of 42 years.