When clevermining comes back online, will my cgminer reconnect to it automatically, or will it stay on my failover pool until I restart it?
Failover mode means it will constantly check if your previous pool is back online and reconnect to it ASAP.
For loads of info like this, just check out the readme.txt that's probably in your cgminer folder... or here:
http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Cgminer_3.1.1_README.txt