(FORTUNE Magazine) – There were times when his campaign seemed hapless, even hopeless. At one rally his wife walked into a room and found only one person in the audience. Once he drove hours in an impossibly frigid New Hampshire night from a meeting of ten people to a meeting of seven. Another night, right around midnight at the Hartford airport, he wolfed down a McDonald's cheeseburger and waved a french fry for emphasis as he sternly told an adviser: "No one does what I've been doing for the past year to wind up as vice president." Even so, his closest aides were plotting an exit strategy for him, trying to figure out how to get him on the ticket with Bob Dole in late summer.

The rest of the campaign will be no Tennessee waltz for Lamar Alexander. But the man in the hunting shirt is still in the chase. He finished third in both Iowa and New Hampshire and is heading toward more familiar turf in the South, to places where the country and gospel songs he plays on the piano are less of a curiosity than they were in Iowa and New Hampshire. But Alexander himself remains something of a curiosity, and so does his improbable campaign, which once seemed pointed toward obscurity but now, on some mornings at least, tries to project an air, ever so faint, of destiny.

He's still not well known, he's still not well financed, he's not on the ballot in some states, and he's still far from the nomination. He's survived on a simple strategy, better suited for the small states than for the big states ahead: Know him, like him, vote for him. Even his inside circle--Tom Rath, who has the face of a leprechaun and the political compass of Meriwether Lewis, and Mike Murphy, who has the hair of Willie Nelson and the lifestyle of Willy Loman--underestimated the hunger of conservatives for someone with a smile.

"Lamar only needed to be a decent guy," says Rath, a former attorney general of New Hampshire. "It turned out that everybody played into this more than we thought they would." Buchanan, Dole, and the rest of the pack fought like bobcats in New Hampshire, their ads intended to score points, not to make friends. They left loads of room for old Lamar, ambling along the country roads in his red-and-black-checked shirt, handing out cornpone and cassettes. Buchanan's pugilistic style carried the day, but the Buchanan fever may not persist all spring. Alexander is positioning himself for the possibility that Buchanan's antibusiness fusillade might take down Dole, leaving him as an acceptable alternative for the GOP establishment.

There's an iron fist inside Lamar Alexander's velvet glove. He was the guy with the first negative ad. He first raised the age issue about Dole. Two nights before the New Hampshire primary, he said Clinton was the first president to "work out his midlife crisis in public." But none of that stuck to him. In the church basements, in town squares, and even in the icehouses on the frozen lakes, voters seemed to speak of the candidates as Dole, Buchanan, Forbes, and Lamar. He was on a first-name basis with New Hampshire.

He may be a plodder, but at heart he is a planner. Even his informality was calculated. It was no coincidence that the enduring memory of voters was of Alexander walking along a snowy road, a dramatic contrast with Dole, who seems most at home in formal reception rooms, and Buchanan, who transforms every hotel lectern into a bully pulpit. Alexander is disciplined, patient, and firm. "He decides what he wants to accomplish, and he organizes himself to accomplish it," says Lewis Lavine, who was his chief of staff for three years in the governor's office.

That's why Democrats believe he'd be the toughest Republican to run against--not as extreme as Buchanan, not as old as Dole, and not as identified with Washington as either of them.

When the story of this year's election is written, historians may find that the shift in momentum occurred on February 18, when 900 people, many of them in red and black, filled Shepard Auditorium at Pinkerton Academy in Derry, New Hampshire, on one of the coldest nights of the year. There was a thicket of boom microphones in Alexander's face, a cheering throng in the hall. "Where did all these people come from?" he asked Rath. They had expected 200.

It was Alexander's ragtime band, filling a room that had been half empty for Dole the night before. On the wall, a piece of masking tape held a seating chart for Dole's event, carefully mapping spaces for all the grandees and dignitaries. An Alexander aide stuffed it in his pocket, battleground debris from an army that had plenty of generals but wasn't ready to fight. It was, he said to no one in particular, like finding the Russians' plans for World War I.

David Shribman is Washington bureau chief for the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize--winning political reporter.