Mahe: Well, the way we express it to prospective clients who come in to see us and the 'What do you do?' question: If your concern is your image, call your public relations firm. If your concern is market share, call your advertising agency. If you're really in a battle and your ass is on the line, call us. We do confrontation. We do battles. I mean we come out of a political background. We understand confrontation in a way that people in the advertising or public relations business do not. We understanding interacting with an opponent in a way that those groups do not. The only other groups of people that really understand confrontation the way we do are professional athletes and trial attorneys. And most everybody else is generally on the field in an environment where they're the only ones on the field.

It's kind of like when you played high school football and this coach was all X's and O's. In theory, every play was a touchdown. Well, most of life and in most businesses, every play is kind of a touchdown because there's no real organized opposition. Well, in politics, that's not clearly the case.

So we do battles. Like we're involved in the Endangered Species Act. We're involved in Super Fund. We get involved in union negotiations where there clearly is a team on the other side.

Q: Is that an approach, a world view, if you will, that was particularly compatible with the world view of the Newt Gingrich that you met back in the 70s?

Mahe: Well, no one would ever question Newt being confrontational. We evolved this application, a translation of this political style to nonpolitical uses in the 80s after we'd met Newt and worked with him for several years. But clearly, Newt's core philosophy would be that if you have to do battle, if it takes confrontation to achieve your goals, then you should be confrontational.

Q: When you met him, your status was what? Where were you in the field?

Mahe: I was Executive Director of the Republican National Committee.

Q: So part of your job was to find up-and-coming Newt Gingriches. Do you recollect that moment when he crossed your screens?

Mahe: Yes. And clearly in that kind of job you meet a lot of candidates. I only actually remember two that precisely. The other one I won't share the story with you because I remembered him for quite the opposite reason of why I remember Newt. But I had a very outstanding executive assistant and she kind of did all these things, and all of a sudden this person shows up in my office, dressed in the style of the 70s with the double knits and the checker coats and all that. And a college professor running in the South, who obviously was not from the South. And for the first few seconds or minute or two, I said to myself, 'Why did Jackie let this person in my office? This person can't be serious. Why is she wasting my time?'

Well, it did not take very long before you realized that you were in the presence of someone with a remarkable mind who really had a good sense of what he was doing and how he was going to do it. So I started to pay attention and I've been paying attention ever since.

Q: It wasn't his ideas so much that got him elected, but positioning, wouldn't you say?

Mahe: Yeah. Yeah. Ideas have very little relevance if you don't put them into the context of positioning. Because you have to relate ideas in the context of the audience that you're talking to and usually in the language or a simile that they can relate to. Newt does that very well. But in point of fact, he would have been elected in '74, I think, without Watergate. He would have been elected in '76 without Jimmy Carter, and '78 was the first time he had a clean shot and, once he had the clean shot, he did get elected.

Q: When Newt finally made it in that first term, it was at once this great moment in time, but at the same time, shortly after he raised his hand and took the oath, it was a disastrously awkward moment in his personal life. Remember for me that moment in the life of Newt Gingrich, whether you ever thought it might derail his prospects. Or how you saw how that moment affected him.

Mahe: Oh yes, that was an extremely difficult time for Newt. Coming the way it did, right, as you say, in the moment that his life was changing and his relationship to his daughters was extraordinarily close. That was part of what was happening at that time. I don't know that I could say that he contemplated going back home, but I know it was a period of time when his attention was clearly diverted because of what was going on in his personal life.