The new approach was evident over two days of campaign events: He called an audience member out of the crowd at one stop to take questions alongside him, sprinkled his speeches with impromptu jokes and asides and practically sneered at President Obama as he lambasted the president’s policies. He laughed a lot, too.

Gone were the poll-tested Tea Party cliches that were peppered throughout Pawlenty’s speeches earlier this year and the plastic grin that he wore many times. His eyes had focus and intensity, not the preoccupied, deer-in-the-headlights expression of previous months.

“I’m just kind of throwing off any ideas of scripts or stuff, and just saying what I think and what I believe, and trying to just be myself, and am being myself,” he said in an interview on Thursday in Fort Dodge, a run-down city of about 25,000, a little under two hours northwest of Des Moines.

Pawlenty has been finding his own voice for a while in fits and starts, but watching him talk to voters this week was the clearest evidence that he is much closer to touching something real as a candidate — that intangible feeling that voters get of connecting with a candidate — than he has been at any point.