In the “nothing succeeds like success” department, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that Newt Gingrich’s polling bubble has paid dividends — literally.  His nearly-moribund fundraising turned around in the first half of this quarter, raising over $4 million after falling more than a million dollars in debt through the previous three quarters:

Newt Gingrich’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, which has struggled financially for most of the year, says the former House speaker raised $4 million in the first half of the fourth quarter, when he began climbing in the polls.

That’s about $1 million more than Gingrich raised in the first five months of the campaign, when he fell nearly $1.2 million in debt, including $450,000 owed to a private jet company. …

“There were days in August when we raised $10,000 overnight and we’d be very excited about it,” Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond said in an interview Wednesday. “Now we see $10,000 an hour.”

Still, the campaign will carry some debt into the new year, Hammond said.

That carried debt might sound odd considering the fact that Gingrich’s haul would easily cover it, but Gingrich needs to spend the cash now, too.  He has to hire staff in a hurry, especially in Iowa, where organization counts more than in primary states like New Hampshire and South Carolina.  Gingrich will have to spend money on advertising in Iowa to compete with Rick Perry’s saturation campaign over the next couple of weeks.  There are few signs of a Perry resurgence, but now that Gingrich has become the semi-official frontrunner in the race, the rest of the field will start taking shots at Gingrich’s record in order to shake conservative support for his candidacy, and Perry could benefit from that process.

Will that work?  In my column today for The Fiscal Times, I review Gingrich’s strengths and weaknesses with the Tea Party base that will sharply influence the direction of this primary season, and conclude that Gingrich might not be quite as vulnerable to losing his big Tea Party polling edge as some think:

To some extent, this appears to be a case of pragmatism. These voters want someone other than Romney, and Gingrich looks like the last person standing. But that overlooks the nuanced history that Gingrich has had with conservative activists. Unlike Romney, who only reached out to the activist base when he became the pragmatic alternative to John McCain in 2008, Gingrich has spent years consistently cultivating relationships with conservative activists. He built an organization, American Solutions, that gave activists a forum in which they could crowd-source efforts to effect conservative change in local communities as well as regionally and nationally.

American Solutions organized the Drill Here, Drill Now push in 2008 during the oil-price shock that pressured the Democratic Congress into relaxing bans on offshore drilling, although the economic collapse later in the year took the issue off the table. Gingrich has been a fixture for years at CPAC, the annual gathering of conservative activists, engaging not just in speeches from the dais but also on the floor of the exhibit room in book signings, grip-and-grins, and blogger interviews.

That record may play into the question of whether Gingrich can hang on to Tea Party support, but perhaps not as strongly as Gingrich might hope. Bear in mind that the Tea Party and CPAC community overlap somewhat but are not the same; the latter can be considered the “establishment” activist set associated with think tanks and well-established organizations, while the former has a more anti-establishment, populist tenor to it.

Gingrich has a couple of big advantages in the calendar and his ability to master debates.  There isn’t much time for anyone else to ride a boomlet to the top, and Gingrich isn’t likely to make the kind of gaffes that the other candidates have made that killed their momentum.  His one big disadvantage is money:

Gingrich is still paying off his campaign debt from his summer collapse. Donors have begun flooding the campaign, but retiring the red ink hasn’t allowed him to build the kind of organization usually needed for a long-haul campaign. Perry has dumped more than a million dollars into Iowa advertising in a saturation campaign aimed at peeling social conservatives away from Gingrich and restoring his own momentum in the caucuses, and Romney has plenty of campaign cash to use in New Hampshire and Florida. Even Ron Paul could damage Gingrich by spending his prodigious campaign cash on advertising designed to point out all of Gingrich’s conservative heresies, and now that Gingrich has become the frontrunner, one would expect that from all of the other candidates as well.

The $4 million haul is a good start, and keep in mind that this came when Gingrich was moving up a lot more slowly than in the past couple of weeks.  Herman Cain was still rising when the quarter started and Gingrich was coming up to 3rd and 4th place in the polling.  His fundraising has likely accelerated in the past three weeks even more.  However, Rick Perry had $15 million in the bank at the end of Q3 after just seven weeks of campaigning and fundraising, and Ron Paul has always enjoyed a robust revenue stream even without getting big polling bounces, while Romney has had a large war chest all along.  I’d expect Romney to only indirectly take on Gingrich in ad wars and Perry to focus more on himself, but Paul is a wild card — and he may decide to go all out to damage Gingrich.  That could have a big impact on the race in Iowa over the next couple of weeks.