President Gingrich?

Newt Gingrich is back. Is failure never permanent?

The former House speaker resigned from Congress in 1998 after the GOP lost five House seats in midterm elections, a crushing rarity for any party that is not in control of the presidency.

As it turned out, he was also having a long, secret extramarital affair with a much younger aide even as he voted to impeach President Clinton. And some fishy political funding of his lecture series had cost him a $300,000 ethics violation fine in 1997.

Now Gingrich is publicly toying with the idea of a run for the presidency in 2008. Or maybe he’s just flogging his new book, “Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract With America.”

Gingrich has certainly benefited from what followed him. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and, even more, Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) have made Gingrich look like a moderate compromiser.

Gingrich may have championed his 1994 “contract with America,” which was supposed to radically shrink the size of government, but he ended up dealing with Clinton on issues like welfare reform and tax cuts.

Gingrich, a former history professor, is a prolific author of history texts and historical potboilers, including a thriller about World War II called “1945.” His latest effort seems to consist largely of conservative nostrums about defeating terrorism and creating private Social Security accounts.

Even if his book is a dud, Gingrich has reason for optimism about his political prospects. The GOP pioneer in political comebacks was, after all, Richard Nixon, who recovered first from political defeat to become president and then from disgrace to become an elder statesman writing on U.S. foreign policy.

More recently, President Bush’s award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former CIA Director George J. Tenet and former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer III shows how easily, and how swiftly, failure can now be repackaged as success.