What's next for Gingrich?

I figure, go back to "not lobbying." After all, not lobbying has made him a wealthy man. Don't know how he does it. I don't lobby either and I'm constantly right next to flat broke.

If he'd done Sugar Daddy Adelson a little prouder maybe he could have found a sinecure in Sheldon's casino empire. As it stands, Adelson has already told the NYT that the next dollar he spends on Republican candidates will go to Romney, so that's not looking like a viable option.

David Frum has a plan for Gingrich. You remember Frum? Canadian kid. Dad was a Toronto dentist who figured out there was more money in strip malls than root canals and rode the late 20th century wave of real estate inflation to a tidy fortune.

David grew up surrounded by the rich and politically well-connected, and eventually parlayed his advantages into a speech-writing gig for W. It was he who coined the phrase Axis of Evil. (Just to toot my own horn here it was me who coined the phrase "other axis of evil" as a reference to the US/NATO hegemon, but as is obvious I owe Frum three quarters of the credit for that.)

Frum was so pleased with this turn of phrase that he couldn't stop taking public credit for it, which led the White House to send him packing.  Apparently W's handlers wanted the President and only the President to take credit for that clever bit of wordsmithing. He landed at the American Enterprise Institute as a "resident scholar".

That gig ended in acrimony in 2010, with suspicions that Frum may have the vocabulary of a conservative but the heart of a unreconstituted liberal. But back to Frum's career plans for Gingrich.

Frum says Newt should bow out of the race now, while he doesn't look quite like a complete loser yet, and then work behind the scenes to ensure an Obama victory. Then Newt would have an entire four year run of being able to shout "if only you'd voted for me" from every town hall lecturn in the land.

"I'm the real conservative; Romney was just a richer and whiter Obama!"

So there you have it; cut and run today, run again for 2016.