THE MAN WITH THE PLASTIC BUCKET

By KAREN TUMULTY/COBB COUNTY

Newt Gingrich was very much like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland--a disembodied grin hovering over Election Day, present but invisible by choice. He could afford to smile over his party's apparent retention of the House. But to help ensure that victory, he had to keep himself out of sight during the campaign season.

In a very real sense, the election had been debated on terms that Gingrich and his troops had set. But as the presidential candidates were pointing the way to the millennium, the Speaker of the House spent the past few months in a tiny world of half-empty hotel ballrooms and news conferences small enough to fit in a hallway. At times, doing missionary work with the already converted, he almost forgot to mention the name of whatever obscure candidate on whose behalf he was appearing.

Always he carried his white plastic ice bucket, the relic of a revolutionary agenda, of his achievement in ending the twice-a-day ice deliveries to congressional offices. The bucket stops here. It had become an inadvertently pathetic symbol.

Of course, Gingrich wasn't really invisible. His public appearances, however, were involuntary, conjurations of Democratic demonology. In that sense, he was everywhere in this election, appearing in what he says were more than 75,000 negative political ads and countless speeches. "Maybe it'll work," he said last month, betraying an instant's doubt before he added, "I don't think so."

It didn't. But by the time he took the stage of a suburban Atlanta hotel to celebrate keeping control of the House, having won his own easy re-election against a millionaire cookie magnate, the larger battle had dragged on to almost 3 a.m. Only a few dozen of his supporters remained to witness what he called a "truly historic moment" that had validated his entire revolution.

During the last weeks of the campaign, Gingrich appeared chastened. He insisted that he had learned his lessons. "You go slower. You prepare the ground. You make sure people understand," he says. This architect of the Contract with America refuses even to discuss an agenda of his own.

But the old instincts haven't left him. In one arena, he appears eager to move ahead. As he talks about the ethics scandals that are beginning to surround the Clinton White House like dandelions, Gingrich sounds once again like the back-bench Congressman who came to national attention waging the war that brought down one of his predecessors as Speaker. "These people are dramatically more dishonest and more systematically covering up than anyone in American history," Gingrich said in the final days of the campaign. "It is breathtaking."

At the same time, however, he can expect the other side to reciprocate, forging ahead on an ethics case against Gingrich that had begun to escalate as Congress adjourned last month. He dismisses that move by his opponents as "a deliberate strategy of exhaustion," but friends and colleagues are worried that it is working, distracting and draining him.

Still, if Election Night marked a political resurrection for Bill Clinton, it also gave a second chance to Newt Gingrich. He has proved he can shut the government down; now he hopes to show he can make it work. And he has to learn to become visible again.

--By Karen Tumulty/Cobb County