It just may be his last, however. Reed has been weathering a blizzard of revelations about his partnership with the convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Prominent state Republicans have called for him to drop out of the race before the April 28 filing deadline. A recent poll showed that his candidacy might even hurt other Republicans, like Gov. Sonny Perdue, who are on the ticket in November. Matt Towery, a pollster who is a former aide to Newt Gingrich, said the Democrats could easily skewer Reed with an ad campaign. “He could just be tattooed by the Democrats with paid media,” Towery explained. “Most people in this state don’t know who Ralph Reed is.”

As we now know, Reed, the former “cherub-in-chief” of American politics, traded his halo to work as a gun for hire in Abramoff’s operation, secretly rallying conservative Christians to do the bidding of Abramoff’s casino clients. This was, in many ways, an understandable role for Reed, a political prodigy, who started in politics as a disciple of Abramoff, the former chairman of the College Republicans. “I used to tell people he was going to be either president of the United States or Al Capone,” Reed’s mother, Marcy, once told USA Today. By the end of the 1990s, when Abramoff came calling, Reed seemed destined for the White House, at least as a top political aide. He was known as the organizational mastermind of the religious right, joining with televangelist Pat Robertson to bring the GOP to Jesus.

Those exploits, as well as his recent public career as an advisor to President Bush, have given him an aura of celebrity in Georgia political circles. He led the state Republican Party in 2002, during the phenomenal upset that unseated Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, a wounded Vietnam veteran. Two years later, Reed led George W. Bush’s 2004 Southern campaign, delivering every state of the former Confederacy. “Until you have seen it firsthand you won’t appreciate it,” Glynn County’s GOP leader Kevin Gough had warned me. “He is like a rock star.”

In person, Reed, 44, doesn’t look anything like a rock star. If it were not for his boots, his tie and the folded four-cornered handkerchief in his sport coat, the Rod Stewart of Southern politics could easily be mistaken for a gangly teenager. He stands about four-fifths the size of a full-grown man, with a doll’s nose, bronzed skin and a wide smile. He can easily disappear in a crowd. But when he speaks, he can also command the room, instantly transforming himself from a choirboy to a statesman, the NASCAR fan’s Bill Clinton.

“I’m a mainstream, balanced-budget, tax-cutting, pro-family, pro-life conservative,” he told a crowd at a candidate forum last month on St. Simons Island. “You are here for the same reason why I am here, because you love your state, and you love your country, and because you want to see good government, and because you want to see people of integrity and conservative principles in office.”

The integrity line has worked well for Reed in the past — Time magazine once called him the “Right Hand of God” in a cover story. But in recent months, with the release by Senate investigators of hundreds of Reed’s e-mails, “integrity” has not been a concept that many have associated with Ralph Reed. Back in 1998, the e-mails reveal, Reed contacted Abramoff to beg for new work in decidedly un-Christian terms. “Now that I am done with electoral politics, I need to start humping in some corporate accounts,” Reed wrote.

Over the next five years, Reed humped the corporate accounts of just about every company that crossed his path — Microsoft, Enron and Verizon, to name a few. He also raked in more than $4 million from Abramoff clients, including an online lottery company and two Indian tribes with casinos. In return, Reed worked, as he put it in one e-mail, to get “our pastors all riled up” — organizing his unwitting followers to oppose gambling regulations and new casinos that would have competed with Abramoff’s clients.

Through radio and mailings, Reed mobilized more than 100 congregations to do Abramoff’s bidding. “We want to bring out the wackos to vote against something,” Abramoff’s partner Michael Scanlon explained in a proposal to one Indian tribe. “The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the Internet and telephone trees.” The arrangement paid huge returns for both Abramoff and Reed, who had worked together during the Reagan years for the College Republicans.

Before long, the partners were scheming to find even bigger paydays. At one point, Reed e-mailed Abramoff, asking for a contribution to his campaign for Republican state chairman of Georgia. “Sure,” replied Abramoff. “Give me the name of the entity.” Reed responded by joking that the check should be made out to “the Reed Family Retirement and Educational Foundation” and gave a fake address in the Grand Cayman Islands. “Ha ha ha,” Abramoff wrote back, promising to send Reed a check for $10,000. In one e-mail exchange with Reed, Abramoff cited a prospective tribal casino client and gushed, “I’d love us to get our mitts on that moolah!!” Reed replied, “Got it.”

By early 2002, even Abramoff was complaining about the greed of Reed. “He is a bad version of us!” the lobbyist exclaimed in an e-mail to Scanlon. “No more money for him.” But the money kept flowing — and Reed wasn’t exactly upfront about where it was coming from. When gambling clients sent in six-figure checks for Reed, Abramoff would pass them through several groups, including a bogus think tank chaired by a yoga instructor and a lifeguard, and a phony outfit called the Faith and Family Alliance. It was a shoddy operation all the way around: Robin Vanderwall, the 37-year-old Republican “director” of the Family Alliance, is currently serving a seven-year sentence for trying to solicit sex over the Internet from a 13-year-old boy.

On the stump, Reed regularly claims that he knew nothing about the scandalous operation that his close friend Abramoff was running. “I was approached by one of the most respected law firms in America and a friend of 20 years,” Reed said during the same St. Simons forum, explaining his cooperation with Abramoff. “I said sure I would be glad to do so as long as I could be assured that I wouldn’t be paid with revenues from another casino. I was assured that wouldn’t be the case. And we know now for the most part that I was not.”

This is a careful non-denial denial. “For the most part” is the key phrase, a lawyerly dodge that Reed uses to obscure the mountains of e-mail evidence against him. At the St. Simons event, I asked him about a recent story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that quoted e-mails Reed responded to that clearly mentioned one of Abramoff’s clients, an online gambling firm called E-Lottery. Reed told me he never noticed the name of the company, which paid Abramoff for Reed’s services. “It was at the bottom of a long e-mail,” Reed said, in what was either a lie or faulty recollection. In fact, the reference to “elot” comes in the first paragraph of a May 23, 2000, e-mail Abramoff forwarded to Reed. A year later, on Jan. 30, 2001, Reed wrote an e-mail to Abramoff referring to the convicted lobbyist’s “elottery friends.”

Other luminaries of the religious right are not fooled. For many anti-gambling activists, he is nothing less than the second coming of Judas, a one-time apostle who violated the first rule of the battle: Never take money from gambling interests. “The Bible says you can’t serve God and Mammon,” Robertson told the New York Times, in one of his only public comments on Reed. “It’s sort of the betrayal of a basic value,” says Rev. Tom Grey of the National Coalition Against Gambling. “Ralph is running for office on the basis of his values.” As a result Reed’s stature among Georgians has taken a beating, with his unfavorable ratings rising from 35 percent to 44 percent among the state’s Republicans, according to a poll in early March by Strategic Vision. “It’s frightened a lot of people, and it’s sad,” said Jerry Loupee, a longtime Republican activist who is helping the Reed campaign. “They are all, ‘Hey, I’m for Ralph, but there are these things out there that bother me.’”

Nonetheless, polls still show Reed with a slight, if dwindling, lead over his July primary opponent, Casey Cagle, a well-meaning local boy — think Woody Harrelson with a Southern accent — on the stump. But the primary is different from the general election. Democrats across the state say privately that a Reed race could be manna from heaven, allowing them to tar all Georgia Republicans with the “culture of corruption” taint.

Following the Republican playbook, Reed has attempted to overcome bothersome facts by taking aim at the messengers — the liberal media. “What I am confident that the voters of this state are going to reject,” Reed announces on the stump, “is an attempt by the liberal media or by others in this campaign to engage in guilt by association.” Bashing the big city newspapers is a well-worn pastime in south Georgia, where folks tend to trust what they see firsthand and what their friends tell them. “You know who is going to decide the outcome of this election,” Gough, the Glynn County GOP chair tells me. “Bubba.” By that, he means that the hypothetical swing voter in the region: a middle-aged white guy who graduated high school and hunts when he can, but does not trust much of what he reads from journalists.

Bubba, in other words, is the kind of voter who might notice a shiny black pair of cowboy boots, but might forgive the fact that Reed traded on his ideals to make a buck. If that happens, Reed, one of the most natural and brilliant political minds in the Republican Party, will be able to count himself one of the lucky ones. If it doesn’t happen, then Reed will find himself the latest in an ever-lengthening list of Republicans whose own hubris was their undoing.

Gingrich spent the next decade in the wilderness, but in a near-miraculous twist of the classic American redemption story, Gingrich’s quixotic bid for the presidency this year actually succeeded, for a time. For a few brief moments, he actually led the pack and felt confident enough to declare on national TV, “I’m going to be the nominee.” Of course, it all came crashing down eventually, as Gingrich’s rise was more a product of the comic weakness of the GOP field and its real front-runner than Gingrich’s strengths, but he still vastly outperformed all expectations and managed to redeem a badly-tarnished reputation.

But Gingrich just couldn’t help himself, and he stayed in the race long past his sell-by date, scuttling his once-in-a-lifetime shot at reclaiming his political career and, we now learn, potentially destroying his financial well-being.

Before he entered the race last year, Newt Gingrich headed a small empire of business and nonprofits that made more than a $110 million over the past decade. But Reuters reports today that the companies may vanish, along with Gingrich’s political career, because they are facing bankruptcies and debt.

Gingrich left the companies and sold his ownership stakes when he ran for the presidency, which may have pushed the already struggling companies over the edge. The biggest was the Center for Health Transformation, Gingrich’s healthcare consultancy, which advocated for an individual mandate much like Obamacare’s, though he later disavowed that.

CHT declared bankruptcy last month, citing declining membership. “Newt was the attraction,” said Steve Hanser, one of the people to whom Gingrich sold the company. He had “a big, magnetic personality, especially in the board room,” and membership went down when he left, Hanser said.

Gingrich may never see most of the $6.4 million he sold his stake for in 2011, as he was to be paid out in increments over a long period of time. And despite the lucrative companies, Gingrich was never extraordinarily wealthy — his six-figure debt at Tiffany became an early campaign issue — and he’s now also facing nearly $5 million in campaign debt left over from his presidential bid, campaign finance reports released this week show.

So, he’s done the only thing he can do and hitched his ride to Romney, who helped former GOP candidate Tim Pawlenty pay off his outstanding campaign debt. It must be humiliating for Gingrich, whose huge pride seems matched only by his hatred of Mitt Romney during the primary, to have to sycophantically campaign for the presumed nominee and apologize for all of his previous attacks.

One can’t help but think this all could have been avoided if Gingrich had just bowed out sometime in February, when he could have left with his head held high, his reputation miraculously redeemed, and in a position to influence whoever emerged as the nominee. He certainly wouldn’t have as much campaign debt, and he may have been able to save his companies. Instead, he stayed long past the bitter end, after reporters had stopped bothering to cover him and the Secret Service had refused to provide him with protection.

Rick Santorum, who also left Congress under a cloud and managed to salvage his reputation this year, seems to offer the alternative. Santorum has gone from a joke with the Google problem who lost his Senate seat by one of the largest margins in recent memories to a early front-runner for the 2016 presidential race, given Republicans’ habit of nominating the person who came in second last time.

Don’t try this at home, folks. It takes a professional politician to pull it off with a straight face.

A sampling of the also-rans’ anti-Romney rhetoric when they were candidates and their obligatory niceness after endorsing Romney.

___

RICK SANTORUM

The former Pennsylvania senator still doesn’t have trouble curbing his enthusiasm for Romney. He waited a month after dropping out of the race to endorse Romney, then emailed his tepid endorsement in the dead of night. He finally got out the E-word in the 13th paragraph of his 16-paragraph statement.

THEN:

—”He is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.” Santorum later said he was referring to Romney’s standing on health care reform.

—”If Mitt Romney’s an economic heavyweight, we’re in trouble, because he was 47th out of 50 in job creation in the state of Massachusetts when he was governor. He may have had some success at making money for himself and his partners at Bain Capital, and I give him a lot of credit for doing so, but that’s a very different thing than going out and creating an atmosphere for people to create — that create jobs.”

NOW:

—”There are many significant areas in which we agree: the need for lower taxes, smaller government and a reduction in out-of-control spending. We certainly agree that abortion is wrong and marriage should be between one man and one woman. I am also comfortable with Gov. Romney on foreign policy matters, and we share the belief that we can never allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons. And while I had concerns about Gov. Romney making a case as a candidate about fighting against Obamacare, I have no doubt if elected he will work with a Republican Congress to repeal it and replace it.” — Endorsement emailed to Santorum supporters.

___

NEWT GINGRICH

Gingrich didn’t formally endorse Romney when he dropped out of the race but spoke well of him and later said that was close enough. The guy who promised not to run down his GOP opponents at the start of the race had some withering things to say about Romney during the heat of the campaign. Gingrich, a former House speaker, would rather you forget that now, though: His anti-Romney videos on YouTube, once public, are now private. The man who repeatedly branded Romney a “Massachusetts moderate” now calls him a “solid conservative.”

THEN:

—”Someone who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when he is president.”

—Are you calling Mitt Romney a liar? “Yes.” Questioned about his previous comment.

—”Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?” To Romney during a debate.

—”Why would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama?”

—”We are not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together and understand what this is all about.”

—”I think that a bold Reagan conservative with a very strong economic plan is a lot more likely to succeed in that campaign than a relatively timid Massachusetts moderate who even The Wall Street Journal said had an economic plan so timid it resembled Obama.”

NOW:

—”I’m going to campaign for him, I favor him over Obama. I went through, like, seven different issues where I favor him. I’ll do everything I can to help elect Romney. … As far as I’m concerned, I’ve endorsed him.”

—”Compared to Barack Obama, Mitt Romney is a solid conservative. And I think you have to come down to, what’s the choice this November? And the choice is the most radical president in American history and a failed president at the economy and somebody who has a solid record on jobs and who, in fact, on basic principles, is conservative. And I think you can get into arguments about who’s how conservative, but compared to Obama, Mitt Romney is a solid conservative.”

___

MICHELE BACHMANN

Bachmann waited four months after dropping out before she endorsed Romney. The congresswoman from Minnesota campaigned with him in Virginia earlier this month but didn’t bring up health care in their joint appearance.

THEN:

—”He can’t beat Obama because his policy is the basis of Obamacare. The signature issue of Obama is Obamacare. You can’t have a candidate who has given the blueprint for Obamacare. It’s too identical. It’s not going to happen.”

—”He’s been very inconsistent on his positions. He’s been on both sides of the abortion issue, on both sides of the issue with same-sex marriage … he was for the TARP bill, the $700 billion bailout and the global warming initiatives.”

NOW:

—”I am endorsing Gov. Mitt Romney for president of the United States, a man who will preserve the American dream of prosperity and liberty.”

—”This is what victory looks like.” Campaigning with Romney in Portsmouth, Va., on the day she endorsed him.

—”He’s very smart. He has a very optimistic message. Women trust him because they see, this is a man who started a business from scratch, for heaven’s sake.”

—”One thing that Mitt Romney has demonstrated, he will repeal Obamacare. That’s a big compare and contrast between Barack Obama. We will never get rid of socialized medicine, which is Obamacare, under Barack Obama. Mitt Romney has committed himself to repealing Obamacare. … A lot of people know Mitt Romney’s positive agenda.”

___

RICK PERRY

If he couldn’t have the GOP nomination himself, Perry still wasn’t about to back Romney. As he dropped out of the race, the Texas governor endorsed Gingrich. He didn’t come around to endorsing Romney until Gingrich announced last month that he was planning to drop out.

THEN:

—”While you were the governor of Massachusetts in that period of time, you were 47th in the nation in job creation. … You failed as the governor of Massachusetts.”

—”If you are a victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina to tell you he feels your pain. Because he caused it.”

—”I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he’d have enough of them to hand out.”

NOW:

—”Mitt Romney has earned the Republican presidential nomination through hard work, a strong organization and a disciplined message of restoring America after nearly four years of failed, job-killing policies from President Obama and his administration.”

___

JON HUNTSMAN

The former Utah governor endorsed Romney at the same time he dropped out of the race in January, but there was no joint appearance.

THEN:

—”You can’t be a perfectly lubricated weather vane on the important issues of the day.”

—”Gov. Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs.”

—”When you combine a record of uncertainty — running first as a senator, as a liberal; governor as a moderate; then as a conservative for the presidency, people wonder where your core is.”

—”He’s been on three sides of every major issue of the day. And because of that it’s going to be very tough in the end to be able to make that trust argument to the American people.”

NOW:

—”It is now time for our party to unite around the candidate best equipped to defeat Barack Obama. Despite our differences and the space between us on some of the issues, I believe that candidate is Gov. Mitt Romney.”

—”I think he’s the best equipped by far to deal with the economic issues and challenges that confront us. … He’s grown a lot, he’s learned a lot. He’s probably better prepared to lead.”

___

RON PAUL

The scrappy Texas congressman was the last man standing among Romney’s GOP opponents, and he’s not ready to make nice yet. Paul announced this week that he won’t campaign anymore, but he’s still collecting delegates at state party conventions and could give Romney grief at the national nominating convention in Tampa, Fla., come August. Paul ran some scorching ads against Romney earlier this year but shied away from going after Romney in person.

THEN:

—Narrator in Ron Paul radio ad: “Mitt Romney can’t fight against Obamacare because he supported the same mandates and government takeovers as governor of Massachusetts. Romney can’t stand up against more bailouts because he supported them. He can’t lead the charge to shrink the government because he has grown it. Romney’s record is liberal and putting him up against Obama is a recipe for defeat.”

NOW:

—”Not soon.” Paul’s answer when he asked Tuesday when he’ll endorse Romney.

___

Associated Press writer Jack Gillum contributed to this report.

Tragic! For now we know that Gingrich won’t even reach that steppingstone, the presidency of the United States, to his predetermined world-historical greatness. And yet he came so close: He was briefly viable at three separate points in this race, before, predictably, tossing it all away — or having Mitt Romney’s super PAC attack snatch it away from him. Let’s recall these three Rises and Falls of Would-Be President Gingrich and share in our despair that the funniest possible presidential nominee, Newt Gingrich in 2012, was not selected in a national primary of his peers.

The Dawn

Rise: For whatever reason (name recognition, actually; that was the reason), many considered Newt a “top-tier candidate” when he first entered the race. “He is in the top tier of prospective candidates but ranks below some of the other contenders,” CNN.com wrote in May 2011, when a CNN.com poll showed him trailing aforementioned “other contenders” Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee. (For more on how all presidential punditry in 2011 was crap, see this.) That same week, Gingrich decided not to participate in the season’s first debate in South Carolina, joining a “batch” of fellow “top-tier Republican prospects — including Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin… Mitch Daniels and Mike Huckabee,” as Politico wrote, who also fancied themselves too prominent to face such lesser candidates as Rick Santorum. Gingrich, a bold-faced name who’d long toyed with a presidential candidacy, had convinced much of the media, without lifting a finger, that he was a Contender.

Fall: Here’s the sort of reception Gingrich would get from his fellow foot soldiers in the Gingrich Revolution after calling Paul Ryan’s Medicare-busting budget “right-wing social engineering” on “Meet the Press,” shortly after entering the race: “”Why don’t you get out before you make a bigger fool of yourself.”

That didn’t help build support from a Republican Party that had just bet its marbles on the purity and truth of all things Paul Ryan. Shortly thereafter, he and Callista went on a cruise through the Greek Islands — not the greatest sign for doubters who thought he lacked the discipline to carry through a presidential campaign. His six-figure debts to jeweler Tiffany & Co., a stupid, private bit of opposition research that didn’t have any relation to soaring federal deficits, still did not sit well with a party fixated on restoring fiscal responsibility. And then, the June Mutiny, when most of his top aides quit en masse — including spokesman (and later top Gingrich super PAC official) Rick Tyler, who a few weeks earlier had testified to Gingrich’s resilience with this glorious, tongue-in-cheek statement to the press:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

And so Gingrich would reemerge at the top, six months later, for a couple of weeks or so.

The Newtening

Rise: Well, all those Herman Cain supporters who wanted a new unhinged screw-up with tons of baggage only had one place to go once Herman Cain left, right? Bachmann was nothing, Perry was nothing, Santorum (at that point) was nothing, and so the party base turned to its former commander, Newt Gingrich, to once more be the grenade that destroyed another Democratic administration’s chance at effective center-left governance. He’d crush Obama in the debates, after all! By mid-December 2011, Gingrich had hit 40 percent in national polls, opening double-digit leads against Mitt Romney both nationwide and in key early states. “I’m going to be the nominee,” he famously predicted that December. “It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee.”

Fall: By Dec. 19, Newt Gingrich had fallen to the mid-teens in Iowa polls. He finished fourth in the state’s kickoff caucuses and fifth in the following week’s New Hampshire primary. When he had had the lead, see, he had pledged to run on positivity ads only — a promise candidates make when their campaigns have no money. Mitt Romney’s super PAC, Restore Our Future, did have money, though, and proceeded to remind voters of all the terrible things Newt Gingrich did, both personally and publicly, in the 1990s. It worked, and Gingrich was pissed.

The South Carolina Putsch

Rise: When Gingrich went to South Carolina, his goal was mostly just to pulverize Mitt Romney out of electability, to show the masses, the cretins, what a horrible choice they were making — a “Massachusetts Moderate” instead of a “Bold Reagan Conservative,” as he defined the choice in typically comical fashion. Winning Our Future, the super PAC largely funded by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, helped him in this regard, by giving him the attack ad money he needed to keep the campaign alive. Romney, to conservatives’ horror, was trashed as a “vulture capitalist” whose record in private equity at Bain Capital saw him buying and “looting” companies that frequently went out of business, while Romney collected fees regardless of the outcome.

But what really worked for Newt was yelling at a couple of debate moderators. No, really, that was it. He first returned fire at black Fox News correspondent Juan Williams, who had asked him whether he thought it could possibly be offensive to label the first black president a “food stamp president” or to suggest that poor, urban youths would need to become janitors at their schools to learn the value of Hard Work. “Only the elites despise earning money,” Gingrich said, to roaring applause from white males. Then, a few days later, he took on highly targetable, wishy-washy CNN anchor John King, who opened a debate by asking him to address his (second) ex-wife’s tell-all appearance on ABC News that same day. Gingrich was ready with his dismissal of both this question and the mainstream media in general:

Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign, is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.

My two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it, and I am, frankly, astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate.

He would defeat Mitt Romney in the South Carolina primary by double digits. The party, disrespectfully, forced Gingrich to continue campaigning in the 40+ remaining states’ contests, instead of simply crowning him president then and there.

Fall: Oh, you know this — Romney’s campaign and super PAC spent nearly quadruple the amount of money on ads in Florida that Gingrich and Co. did. Money: It works! As for the debates, which Gingrich had begun touting as the No. 1 reason to select him to face President Obama one-on-one — well, Mitt Romney, in a vintage Mitt Romney move, hired a new debate coach to teach him not to lose miserably to Newt goddamn Gingrich, and it worked. Gingrich couldn’t even flatten CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer, who essentially wears a sign saying “FLATTEN ME” at all times, when he tried. Romney won the state, and from there on out his chief not-really-challenging rival became Rick Santorum. Gingrich was done.

– – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – –

A shame, really. Not that Gingrich left much of an impact at all on the election, or could have guided America to better days if he’d become president. He was just funny to watch, is all. And some of his choicest attack lines on rival Mitt Romney will live on through November, thanks to the Obama campaign’s ad team.

Will Newt Gingrich run again? It’s hard to say no definitively, since he is insane. Most likely he’ll do the pre-2012 Newt Gingrich presidency routine, where he pretends that he may run for a little while, just long enough to build up enough PAC donations that can then be converted into a comfortable salary for himself for another few years. We’ll see. If he does run again, though, don’t expect him to do things any differently. He is incapable of change. We salute him.

Is the price of gas correlated to the price of a primary vote? I decided to chart the price fluctuations in gasoline against the price fluctuations of Republican voters since the Iowa caucuses, because the Internet loves charts and campaign finance. If you think filling up your car is expensive, try running for president! (That is probably something Mitt Romney will say on camera at some point this week.)

Here is the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded versus the average amount spent by all the Republican campaigns per vote cast in each primary and caucus so far: (Click all images to enlarge.)

The same chart, without pricey Iowa distorting the scale:

As you can see, the price of gas has actually barely budged and everyone should calm down.

Now, with millions of dollars spent and votes cast, your typical Republican voter is probably asking himself, “How many gallons of gas am I worth, based on what the campaign spent convincing me to vote for them? We’re here to help, typical Republican voter!

I’ve charted how many gallons of gas each campaign could’ve bought with the money spent per vote received so far. (For example: Ron Paul has spent approximately $31.55 for every vote received. This makes each one of his voters worth a whopping 8.24 gallons!)

In primary battles, as in all aspects of life under capitalism, some people are worth more than others. Delegates, for example. While Mitt Romney has spent about $17 per vote received, he has spent $67,000 for each delegate he’s been awarded. So I added Romney delegates to the preceding chart, in order to properly illustrate just how worthless your vote actually is:

A Mitt Romney delegate is worth 1,700 gallons of gas. That is enough to fill 1,000 Cadillacs!

Data from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Department of Energy, AAA, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

Still, Newt’s excuse for remaining in the race (besides as a means of confounding the “elite” who are terrified of his multitude of big ideas) is that the GOP nominee needs to win the South, and only he can win the South. He is basically campaigning right now solely to win Mississippi and Alabama next Tuesday.

But polls now show Mitt Romney beating Gingrich in Alabama. Alabama State University’s Center for Leadership and Public Policy has 22.7 percent for Santorum, 18.7 percent for Romney, and 13.8 percent for Gingrich. The Alabama Education Association has Romney winning at 31 percent with Gingrich 10 points back.

I haven’t seen any recent polls in Mississippi, but Rick Santorum’s super PAC is spending big in both states.

Losing either Alabama or Mississippi — or both — would be bad news for what everyone has taken to calling Newt Gingrich’s “Southern Strategy.” (I am guessing half the people mentioning Newt’s “Southern strategy” on Fox every day have no idea what they’re referring to and the other half know perfectly well and think it’s funny.) It would effectively end his campaign, even if for some weird reason Gingrich decided to just keep going for a while longer, because he has some weird point to make.

Gingrich is either exhausted or still enjoying himself, depending on how you read his dancing with his wife to “Rocket Man” last night. (“The song evokes Gingrich’s support for space exploration and desire to develop a colony on the moon,” according to the Post.) He certainly hates Mitt Romney and believes that The People will eventually see the brilliance of Newt Gingrich if only he’s given a national platform. But I’m not sure Gingrich is insane enough to continue past next week. He has already achieved what was arguably his primary goal in running: significantly increasing his earning power.