South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint pulls a "Palin" and leaves office halfway through second term. Well isn't THAT interesting?

So apparently Jim DeMint, conservative Senator and teabagger extraordinaire, has decided that he is done with actual policy making and instead wants to take a job with he Heritage Foundation, a conservative "think tank" that essentially bitches about policies that politicians SHOULD be making.

So this would mean that DeMint would go from actually having an impact on the direction the country is going to just complaining about the direction this country is going. Isn't that kind of a demotion?

This from the Wall Street Journal:

In an interview preceding the succession announcement, Sen. DeMint said he is taking the Heritage job because he sees it as a vehicle to popularize conservative ideas in a way that connects with a broader public. "This is an urgent time," the senator said, "because we saw in the last election we were not able to communicate conservative ideas that win elections." Mr. DeMint, who was a market researcher before he entered politics, said he plans to take the Heritage Foundation's traditional research plus that of think tanks at the state level and "translate those policy papers into real-life demonstrations of things that work." He said, "We want to figure out what works at the local and state level" and give those models national attention. 

Mr. DeMint, an active conservative partisan often at odds with his party's leadership, says he will "protect the integrity of Heritage's research and not politicize the policy component. Heritage is not just another grassroots political group."

Okay is anybody else picking up a strong scent of bullshit here?

WHY would somebody leave their job in the Senate to push and agenda that polls show the majority of Americans are no longer interested in anymore? That is kind of like quitting your job to head up advertising for New Coke after everybody started spitting it out and moving over to Pepsi.

So conspiracy theory time.

Is Jim Demint simply reading the writing on the walls and realizes that the Teabaggers are facing extinction, and that his influence in the Senate will be minimal at best?

Or, is he moving out of the way in a prearranged agreement to open the spot for South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley? (Though doing it now makes little sense.)

Or , and this is my favorite, is there a scandal brewing that DeMint is trying to avoid, and is therefore making himself a smaller target in the hopes that it will disappear?

Well right now I am not at all sure which one of these, if any, are the reason behind this surprising development. However I would be willing to bet that the reason provided is not even close to the actual reasons behind DeMint's decision.