Apart from having a personal fortune he is a formidable money-raiser: on a single day in May he raked in more than $10m of contributions via a phone-bank appeal.
But he gave his party, for a while, a blistering coherence, and that has disappeared.Political pundits think Mr Gingrich, who has a formidable money-raising machine, may just possibly recast himself and run in 2000; but his congressional troops will be harder to reassemble.
Last autumn, his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate seemed inevitable: the governor of Texas boasted a decent record, a likeable character, a well-known name, a new slogan ("compassionate conservatism") and the most formidable money machine modern politics has ever seen.
Doctorow claimed that his portrait of the financier JP Morgan in Ragtime was largely based upon deep study of an Edward Steichen photograph of the formidable money man.
Mr. Ball said that, after his triumph with "American Beauty," he was not tempted by formidable money offers to write more film scripts.
If Mr. Samberg is known for granting autonomy to his formidable money managers, there are said to be differences between him and Mr. Benton, who oversees the firm's technology investment group.
This is a structural advantage that far outweighs the negative of the Bush name, especially given the reality that the Rs may be running against Clinton Inc, the most formidable money machine in history".
The increasingly formidable Money Out /Voters In (MOVI) Coalition, Common Cause and the California Public Interest Research Group raised enough of a grassroots ruckus to inspire the L.A. City Council to adopt and place Proposition C on Tuesday's ballot.
After all, consulting firms would not have transformed themselves into such formidable money-machines if they did nothing but pillage their clients.
