Greenville, S.C. — In South Carolina, getting to see, not just hear, Newt Gingrich is a challenge.

Arriving late to his town hall at Bobby’s BBQ and unable to get past the porch, I can only hear his voice piped out. Dozens of people lean against railings; another handful contentedly sit on rocking chairs out on the porch, listening to Gingrich’s voice fall and rise as they rock back and forth. The room he’s in — a large, open one — is packed. It is the same story, just hours later, at a town hall held at Mutt’s BBQ: The room where Gingrich speaks is packed, and the overflow crowd — again, hearing Gingrich’s voice through speakers — is scattered throughout the rest of the restaurant.

At Bobby’s, talking about the “energy” in the room, Gingrich emphasizes the importance of a win on Saturday. “If we carry Saturday,” he says. “I think I will become the nominee this fall.”

Then he delivers his pitch.

“As the nominee, I will challenge President Obama to seven three-hour debates in the Lincoln–Douglas tradition,” he says, to loud applause. “With a timekeeper and no moderator,” Gingrich adds, as the applause ebbs. “Yes!” shouts a man in the audience.

For months now, Gingrich, who tends to shine in debates, has been talking about his proposal to debate President Obama seven times. (His back-up plan, if Obama refuses to debate so many times, is to follow Obama wherever he goes and deliver a rebuttal to any remarks the president makes four hours later.) It’s almost impossible to overstate how much of a selling point that proposal — and Gingrich’s feisty rhetoric when talking about Obama — is to South Carolina voters.

“I’d pay a lot to see him debate Obama,” says Ted Wasserlein, a retiree from North Augusta, S.C. Susan Swanson, who runs a pregnancy-care center, thinks that Gingrich’s history background will be a crucial asset in the debates. “When you understand the history of where our country’s been and where we’re going, it’s just a lot easier to debate Obama,” she remarks. “Whoever goes up against Obama has got to be a tough act to take down, because Obama will pull out every stop.” William Brown, a retiree from Aisley, S.C., is confident in pitting Gingrich against Obama. “I think he’ll pick Obama like chicken,” he says.

At the PersonhoodUSA candidate forum held Wednesday night, Gingrich again showed off his rhetorical chops, getting a more enthusiastic response than any other candidate besides Ron Paul, who had a huge number of dedicated supporters there to cheer him on.

Describing how he had become strongly pro-life, Gingrich talked about how he had been approached in a restaurant by a woman who objected to his position on abortion, arguing that it was her body and that any pregnancy was a “malignant tumor.” For Gingrich, it was a moment when his pro-life views solidified.

“We’re going to have an argument about whether or not [a fetus] is life,” he added. “If it is life, we’re then going to have an argument about how you live that out, and how you legislate it out.” And then Gingrich goes for the clincher: “But I have zero doubt that when a woman becomes pregnant, it is not a malignant tumor. It is a baby.” The audience erupts into applause, cheering and hollering.

“Newt Gingrich, I think, can take Obama on, toe-to-toe, and he proved that again tonight,” said Donna Wheeler, a registered nurse from Simpsonville, S.C., who attended the PersonhoodUSA event. She wasn’t as impressed by Rick Santorum, who also spoke. “I love Santorum’s convictions in terms of the family,” she says, “but I think we need somebody who can go toe-to-toe with Obama. They have to be able to not be afraid or stand down.”

Gingrich, perhaps more so than any candidate left in the field, relishes the possibilities of rhetoric. Talking about how he changes the way he presents certain topics on the stump, Gingrich observes, “If you watch the 15 debates, I never know in advance which ones will work. . . . You’ll see me do three or four or five things that are okay, but not particularly interesting, and suddenly we’ll hit the right moment, we’ll [have] the right phrase.”

At Mutt’s BBQ, a homey restaurant (sample decoration: a sign with “Hogs are Beautiful” written under a sketch of two hogs), Gingrich sprinkles crowd-pleasing lines throughout his stump speech, mixing tough talk against liberals with humorous asides and historical references. Talking about his plan to reduce fraud, he notes he wrote a book titled Stop Paying the Crooks. “We couldn’t get anyone in Washington to read it,” he quips. Mocking those who advocate redistribution, Gingrich goes on an extended riff about what would happen if happiness were seen as something to be redistributed.

“There’s no provision for happiness stamps for the under-happy,” he jokes. “There’s no provision for a Federal Department of Happiness. And if you had said to the Founding Fathers that a politician would walk into a room like this and say, ‘I’m going to take from the overly happy and I’m going to redistribute to the underly happy and have a happiness czar — that’s good.’”

“Think about it,” he adds, as the laughter and clapping in the room subsides. “They would have said, ‘what kind of arrogance do your elected officials have that they think they have the right to take from one American who they picked to give to another American?’ Just baloney.”

Gingrich doesn’t ignore his rivals. Referencing a historical pejorative for the supply-side economic policies that Gingrich embraces, he weaves in a crack about how “the establishment people who back Romney called it ‘voodoo economics.’”

He argues that a vote for any other conservative candidate would be a waste. “To vote for anyone else is a vote that allows Mitt Romney to be potentially our nominee,” he says. “I think having a Massachusetts moderate would in fact be a very, very weak hand going in and would be a really disappointing hand trying to govern.” Rick Perry, on Thursday morning, seemed to agree — he dropped out of the race and endorsed Newt Gingrich, whom he called “a true conservative visionary.”

But Gingrich never forgets his key selling point, those general-election debates.

“One of the reasons I want to debate the president,” Gingrich says at Mutt’s, “is that I want to draw a sharp distinction between the American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American Federalist Papers, and the American Founding Fathers on one side, and Saul Alinksy’s radicalism, secularism, and European socialism on the other side.”

“And I believe the clearer we make this,” Gingrich tells the crowd, “the worse he will do.” With an electorate focused on beating Obama, that just may be the message to pull off a win in the Palmetto State.

— Katrina Trinko is an NRO reporter.