If you don't watch the Fox News Channel or programs such as CBS' "Face the Nation" -- or any number of other talking head programs -- you probably last encountered Gingrich while he was vigorously promoting "Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less." (Earlier this year, he co-authored "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less: A Handbook for Slashing Gas Prices and Solving Our Energy Crisis.")

Starting this spring, he'll be putting on his professor's cap and teaching a course on judicial review at the University of Georgia's school of law as a Carl E. Sanders Political Leadership Scholar.  

There is no question that Newt Gingrich is a fascinating mélange: Professor and pundit, innovator and instigator, a promoter of so-called "traditional family values" and violator of said "values," and a figure admired for his being smart yet heartily disliked for being a smarty pants.  

These days, he's in overdrive. Is the 2012 Republican Party's presidential nomination in his sights?  Or his rear view mirror?      

The former House Speaker, who three years after engineering 1994's Republican "Revolution" -- which succeeded in taking control of the House for the first time in 40 years -- accompanied by his "Contract with America," was forced to resign due to a series of ethical missteps that severely compromised his effectiveness and lowered even further the public's perception of him.

Gingrich emerged from Election 2008 as a go-to-guy -- along with Karl Rove -- for a mainstream media in need of a well-schooled GOP insider to comment on the GOP's internal politics.    

Rehabbing his image; courting the base

Since leaving Congress, Gingrich has been rehabilitating his image and covering his bases: He is a senior fellow at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on health care (he founded the Center for Health Transformation), information technology, the military, and politics, and he is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the conservative think tank Hoover Institution, focusing on U.S. politics, world history, national security policy, and environmental policy issues. In November 2001, he was appointed to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (DPB), an advisory board for the Department of Defense.

Never really of the Religious Right -- he ran his first congressional (which he lost) as an environmentalist -- Gingrich has actively courted the Party's base. In addition to penning "Rediscovering God in America" -- a book maintaining that the Founding Fathers vigorously encouraged religious expression in the public square -- in March 2007, he appeared on the radio program of Focus on the Family's Dr. James Dobson, where he was in full confessional mode.

Asked about his personal failings, Gingrich said: "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards." The confessional was clearly aimed at assuring the base that he was done with serial affairs and divorces, and that he could be a trusted ally.  

Last year, Al Gore persuaded him to share a couch with current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as part of Gore's campaign to raise awareness about Global Warming. (Gingrich later apologized to conservatives for couching with Pelosi and for appearing to support Gore's cause.)

After he castigated gays and lesbians for their "secular fascism," he was roundly condemned by his younger gay half-sister Candace in "A Letter to My Brother Newt Gingrich."  

Gingrich can be a go-for-the-throat partisan, which is best characterized by remarks he made shortly before Election Day in 1994, when he warned voters that if they cast their ballot for Democratic Party candidates, they would get the type of people that condone the actions of Susan Smith, the mother who drowned her two young sons? The full Gingrich: "The mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we have to have change. I think people want to change and the only way you get change is to vote Republican. That's the message for the last three days."      

He is also a man with a long memory: He still appears to be seething over the time during the Clinton Administration when he, and then-Senator Bob Dole, were placed at the back of Air Force One. He reacted to the "snub" by causing parts of the Federal government to shut down for lack of funds. In his book, "No Retreat, No Surrender," Tom DeLay wrote that Gingrich "made the mistake of his life" and added: "He told a room full of reporters that he forced the shutdown because [of the snub] ... Newt had been careless to say such a thing, and now the whole moral tone of the shutdown had been lost. What had been a noble battle for fiscal sanity began to look like the tirade of a spoiled child. The revolution, I can tell you, was never the same."

These days, aside from thinking about 2012, Gingrich is staking his future on American Solutions for Winning the Future. And a number of longtime major contributors to the Republican Party are staking him.  

The organization received more than $16 million during the election season, including major donations from Carl H. Lindner and Sheldon Adelson. Adelson, the chairman and chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation and who has an estimated net worth in excess of $26.5 billion, is one of the 'Funding Fathers' of the Republican-oriented lobbying group Freedom's Watch. He has given Gingrich's group a total of $5.4 million.

The Center for Public Integrity reported that Gingrich's "Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less" campaign reported a total $1.9 million in contributions for August, its second-best fundraising month. The Center also reported that American Solutions' best month was June, which yielded $2.1 million "when the group rolled out its campaign to end the 27-year-old U.S. moratorium on offshore drilling, and Republican presidential candidate John McCain took up the cause."

The $16 million pushed American Solutions to the No. 2 fundraising spot among so-called 527 political groups this [past] election season," the Center for Public Integrity pointed out. "Only the Service Employees International Union's issues-advocacy arm has raised more; SEIU has voluntarily filed with the Federal Election Commission as a campaign committee, making it subject to donation limits."

Gingrich has never been as popular as President Bill Clinton, nor has he achieved the level of respect that Clinton has around the world. Nevertheless, he is now, and has been for more than 15 years, a major presence on the U.S. political landscape. Whether he will be able to harness his hubris and raise the necessary funds to eclipse the likes of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee or Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in the race to become the GOP's next standard bearer, bears watching.