“He’s extremely thin-skinned,” said chief Perry strategist Dave Carney of Romney after the forum. “He got very rattled, and I think that’s something we hadn’t seen before.”

Stuart Stevens, Carney’s counterpart with the Romney campaign, was equally pointed.

“People are looking for a lot of qualities in the next president, and someone who responds to losing debates with anger is not a quality that they particularly like,” Stevens said, deeming Perry a desperate hothead. “It’s like in a football game, when somebody’s losing and they start shoving.”

None of the previous debates exposed the guts of the Republican contest quite like this because none had been so personally nasty. That Perry and Romney can’t stand one another has long been accepted in GOP circles, but their mutual contempt came into stark relief on the Strip. It overshadowed all else and even managed to overshadow Herman Cain, whose rapid rise in recent polls wasn’t matched by his performance Tuesday night.

If anything, the duel in the desert seemed to reorder the campaign and return it to its natural order.