American Solutions doesn’t appear to pay Gingrich a direct salary, but it has spent millions on private jets to ferry him and his staff around the country and generally allow him to promote his books and movies. (There are other groups, like Gingrich’s for-profit Center for Health Transformation, that may be paying Gingrich directly, but such information is private.) So far this election cycle, American Solutions has taken in over $20 million, and poured much of it back into fundraising expenses.

We’ve taken a look at the IRS forms that American Solutions files periodically showing what’s coming in and what’s going out. Here are some of the group’s biggest funders:

• American Electric Power: Michael Morris, the CEO of this Ohio-based power giant, gave $100,000 last year. Along with generating lots of electricity, the company operates the nation’s largest power transmission network, operating over much of the East Coast and Midwest.
• Plains Exploration and Production Co.: This Houston-based oil and gas company that operates in the Gulf gave $100,000.
• Workforce Fairness Institute: A Washington, D.C.-based anti-union pressure group, the institute’s own source of funding is not known. It gave $150,000 to Gingrich’s organization this cycle. Its website says it is “funded by and advocates on behalf of business owners who enjoy good working relationships with their employees, and would like to maintain those good relationships without the unfair interference of government bureaucrats, union organizers and special interests.” Mark McKinnon, the longtime GOP operative and Bush aide, has been a spokesman for the institute.
• Hubbard Broadcasting: Stanley Hubbard, a billionaire GOP donor from Minnesota, gave Gingrich’s group $100,000. He owns radio and TV stations in several states as well as ReelzChannel, a movie news channels on cable.
•  Devon Energy: A huge Oklahoma-based oil and gas production company, it has given American Solutions $250,000.
• Arch Coal: Based in St. Louis, Arch boasts it provides 16 percent of America’s coal supply from 11 mining complexes around the country. That makes it the second largest coal producer in the country. It gave Gingrich $100,000.
• Crow Holdings: A privately held Dallas real estate investment firm, it gave Gingrich’s group a whopping $350,000. Harlan Crow, son of the late real estate investor Trammell Crow, is active in a range of conservative causes including the Club for Growth and the American Enterprise Institute. He is a patron of Clarence Thomas and once gave the justice a Bible owned by Frederick Douglass worth $19,000.

Unsurprisingly, given the contributor list, American Solutions has run national TV ads opposing the cap-and-trade bill. But more than anything, the group is a vehicle for self-promotion for Gingrich, one that he benefits from financially.

This is particularly notable because Gingrich struggled through much of his earlier career with financial problems. Speaking to Esquire, his ex-wife Marianne recounted one story when she and Newt, burdened with child support payments and other debts, didn’t have $10 to buy a charity ticket. Then in 1997, when he was fined $300,000 by the House for ethical lapses — some involved financial shenanigans with his network of charities — he simply didn’t have the money to pay. This led to an embarrassing episode in which he was going to get a loan from Bob Dole to pay the fine before scrapping the arrangement when it came under scrutiny.

So if what Gingrich really cares about is making money, as his ex-wife contends, American Solutions is a significant accomplishment.

And yet, Mitt has been AWOL from the pile-on. We asked his spokesman for a comment more than a week ago, and never heard back. Smith, apparently, had a similar experience. Only after his piece went up this morning did Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s press guy, say that his boss opposes the mosque because of “the wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda.”

At first glance, it seems like Team Romney may have been caught sleeping. But I doubt that’s what’s going on. Romney has been pursuing the presidency with single-minded determination since 2004, when he began junking the moderate image he’d used to win election as Massachusetts’ governor in 2002 and rebranding himself as a fire-breathing conservative.

Back then, Mitt had a lot of compensating to do. He’d left an extensive paper (and video) trail of cultural liberalism (and a boast that he’d voted for a Democrat for president) in the Bay State. So his strategy was simple: get as far to to the right as possible and do it as quickly and loudly as possible on every issue that resonates with the national GOP electorate — abortion, gay rights, immigration and so on. Past positions be damned. If doing so threatened to make him a tougher general election sell — well, he’d deal with that when he got there. And he’d never get there if he couldn’t overcome the skepticism of the GOP’s very conservative base. This was the Mitt who, for instance, called for the wiretapping of mosques in 2005.

It worked well enough in 2008. Romney won a lot of admirers, briefly emerged as the GOP front-runner, then finished in second place. Which was fine with him: By February ’08, when he dropped out, it was clear that the fall campaign would be a very heavy lift for any GOP nominee. So finishing second in the primaries and establishing himself as the next-in-line candidate for ’12 wasn’t a bad consolation prize.

And now, as ’12 approaches, the challenge is a little different for Mitt. His Massachusetts past is more distant. There’s still skepticism on the right about his commitment to the cause (and there always will be), but it’s not as intense. He has, in other words, just a little more wiggle room — more of an opening to balance general election calculations with GOP primary imperatives.

Here, a parallel can be drawn to Richard Nixon, like Mitt an ideological chameleon with an overpowering drive to claim the White House. Back in 1966, when a midterm election with eerily similar dynamics to this year’s, was playing out, Nixon was furiously positioning himself for the ’68 presidential race. With riots breaking out in cities and Vietnam protests growing in size and volume, the major issue, by far, was “law and order.” With little subtlety, GOP candidates were playing on white America’s racial fears and resentments, peeling off the white ethnic base of the Democratic Party. It was a political gold mine — the GOP ended up picking up 47 House seats. But, as Rick Perlstein points out in “Nixonland,” Nixon — who kept up a frantic schedule campaigning with GOP candidates all year — tried hard to avoid talking about “the hottest Republican issue”:

It served a political requirement. What Richard Nixon was campaigning for now was respectability. Yes, law and order was breaking down; the crime rate was making ordinary Americans terrified to walk the streets; “the cities” were becoming wastelands. But others were doing just fine tying these facts to Lyndon Johnson, softening him up for 1968: George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, dozens of lesser figures. There was no percentage for Nixon in adding to the pile-on. The task now was making sure the pundits and the papers no longer considered the idea of him competing for the presidency as a joke. The key to that was raising his stature.

I’d chalk up Mitt’s mosque reluctance to the same basic calculation. Sure, he’s staked out his share of embarrassing red-meat positions this year; he only has so much wiggle room, after all. But where’s the percentage for him in the mosque issue? The Mitt of  2006 and 2007 would have been all over it, but in 2010, he has a little less to prove to the right. Which made staying out of the fight a chance for Romney to gain a subtle stature advantage over the rest of the field. Of course, once the media started asking questions about his silence, he had no choice but to dive in, lest the GOP’s Islamophobic base think he was going soft on Muslims. But I’d say Mitt’s silence these past few weeks was quite intentional.

He wants to run for president.

She gives a jaundiced look. “There’s no way,” she says. She thinks he made a choice long ago between doing the right thing and getting rich, and when you make those choices, you foreclose other ones. “He could have been president. But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don’t like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way.”

So how is Newt making all this money?  With a network of non-profit and for-profit groups that are financed by industry and are devoted above all to promoting Gingrich himself. It turns out this very much resembles the setup that got Gingrich fined $300,000 by the House ethics committee in the 1990s. A sample:

Then there’s the Center for Health Transformation, another group Gingrich runs. On its Web site, it describes its work in Georgia as a model for all its efforts and says the “cornerstone” of its work is a group called Bridges to Excellence. But CHT “had zero role in creating Bridges to Excellence,” says François de Brantes, the group’s CEO. CHT helped with organization for one year and hasn’t been associated with them since 2008. The CHT Web site also singles out the “Healthy Georgia Diabetes and Obesity Project” as its major diabetes effort, but that was news to the American Diabetes Association. “We were not able to find any information about this,” says the ADA’s communications director, Colleen Fogarty. “The person that was in contact with them is no longer here.” It turns out that the CHT is a for-profit outfit that charges big health insurers like Blue Cross and Blue Shield up to $200,000 a year for access to the mind of Newt Gingrich.

…

One of Gingrich’s former advisors told The Washington Post that he’s “making more money than he ever thought possible, and doesn’t have to tell everybody where it’s coming from.”

 Other highlights: Marianne claims, among other things, that Gingrich started dating his first wife, his high school geometry teacher, when he was 16 — not 18, as he has said.

The whole profile is definitely worth a read.