In a corner office in the U.S. Capitol, a short stroll down the marble corridor from the room where Speaker of the House Jim Wright is writhing in a stew of ethics charges, the man who's put Wright in that fix seems quite out of sorts himself. "I'm a controversial guy," Newt Gingrich says, with the air of a man who has discovered something surprising about himself. He isn't sure he should make himself available for a magazine story, explaining, "I'm not up to speed on the national press."

It is an amazing assertion, coming from the congressman who once declared he was "reshaping the entire nation through the news media," who just a week earlier had been quoted in Newsweek as saying, "If you're not in The Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist." Gingrich, Congress's own automated-teller machine of quotes, is not up to dealing with the press? Something is definitely wrong.

In fact, it has been a terrible week for the chunky, forty-five-year-old Republican congressman from Georgia, and this is only Thursday afternoon. On Tuesday, The New York Times gave prominent display on its op-ed page to an article written by one of Gingrich's most bitter Democratic foes, Representative Bill Alexander of Arkansas, who branded Gingrich a neo-McCarthyite and urged his colleagues to take up the fight against him. Then Gingrich and his wife, Marianne, met with reporters to answer charges (filed by Alexander) of possible improprieties in an unusual book-promotion deal --improprieties loosely similar to those with which Gingrich has charged Speaker Wright. It was a difficult, testy news conference; the press couldn't resist probing the obvious parallels, and after just a few moments Marianne Gingrich stalked out of the press gallery, sobbing. The event landed Newt and Marianne Gingrich on the front page of Wednesday's Washington Post .

Thursday is going downhill fast. It began with a morning meeting with House Republican officials in the office of Bob Michel, the minority leader. Gingrich discovered that four Democratic congressmen were asking the House ethics committee to appoint an outside counsel to investigate the charges against him. The next item on his schedule was a National Press Club luncheon, at which he was to be the featured guest. Marianne Gingrich was supposed to attend as well, but she had been so upset that she refused to accompany her husband. Now, when he returns to his office following the lunch, she is on the phone, in tears; a friend from Ohio has called, asking about an account of the press conference in the Cleveland Plain Dealer .

"He is a little testy today," says Sheila Ward, Gingrich's faithful young press aide, who has just earned a wicked blast of Gingrich ire for turning up the sound on an office television (tuned, appropriately enough, to C-SPAN, the public-service cable network that covers government).

It was probably inevitable that Gingrich, himself an accomplished slinger would get splattered in Washington's current mud bath. Not only is he the man who put Jim Wright, the top Democrat in the country, on the spit, but his decade-long career in the House of Representatives has been one sustained assault on the opposition party --known in the Gingrich lexicon as "the corrupt left-wing machine" that exists to perpetuate "the corrupt liberal welfare state." Almost from the moment he arrived in town, Gingrich, who looks like Pete Rose (and, for that matter, plays Congress in the headfirst style in which Rose played baseball), has been practicing what he calls "confrontational activism," a standard theme of which is the defeatist psychology of the Soviet-appeasing Chamberlains on the other side of the aisle.

But even this is not why Newt Gingrich stands at center stage in the political theater just now. To many in Washington, both those who admire and those who loathe the Georgia representative, Newt Gingrich is the future of American politics, arrived; a hope, or a nightmare, come true.

This spring, in an extraordinary jolt to the usually somnolent politics of House Republicans, Gingrich leapt from his niche as a back-bench bomb thrower to the post of minority whip, a key position in a party leadership. His ascension changes the chemistry of politics on Capitol Hill and signals a dramatic new Republican strategy. After thirty-four years as the minority party in Congress, years of deep frustration, the Republicans seem ready to launch an all-out war on Democratic dominance, attacking the Democratic Party as a whole with the same spectacularly successful (if ungentle) tactics that George Bush's campaign managers used against Michael Dukakis in 1988.

The Bush campaign sank Dukakis by playing to the national gut --driving the public perception of the Democratic candidate to the far left with such devices as the Willie Horton ads, which portrayed Dukakis as being soft on crime by focusing on Massachusetts's prison-furlough program. (Horton, a scary-looking black man, raped a white woman while on a weekend leave from a Massachusetts prison.) The architect of that campaign, political consultant Lee Atwater, is now chairman of the Republican National Committee, and his former boss, political consultant Ed Rollins, is head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Atwater was among the first to applaud Newt Gingrich's selection as whip: "He talks the kinda talk I like." It is clear that the Atwater-Rollins wing of the party, at least, intends Gingrich to be the Republicans' front man in the drive to do for all of the G.O.P. what Atwater did for George Bush--to "Willie Horton" the Democratic House of Representatives by hammering away at the theme of "institutional corruption."

"I think Newt Gingrich has an opportunity to have a somewhat unprecedented role for a Republican House member," Atwater says. "He can truly be a national political guru for our party. He can be a spokesman, he can be a philosopher, and he can be a strategist for our party. As Teddy Roosevelt once said about the bully pulpit, Newt Gingrich has an opportunity to be as big a man as he can be."

Gingrich is eager for the role. By Saturday he has shaken off the setbacks of the news conference and the Democrats' attacks--"a smear campaign by Jim Wright's cronies"--and is pounding away once more at the "corrupt left-wing machine." He spends most of the day at Atwater's home, plotting strategy. His goal: a Republican majority by 1992. ("And the great thing about Gingrich," says Atwater, "is that he really believes it.") That evening, after attending the White House correspondents dinner, Gingrich makes an appearance on a public-television talk show, where he says that God has given him a mission: "To find honest self-government and to survive as a free people."

It will be hard for the Democrats to campaign against that.

Not surprisingly, Gingrich has often been diminished by his colleagues in the House as a fast-talking demagogue, or worse. Beryl Anthony Jr. of Arkansas,the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says simply, "He's crazy." In 1985, The Washington Post wrote that "Newt Gingrich may be just about the most disliked member of Congress."