Maureen Dowd: Where the Wild Thing Is.

Where the Wild Thing Is
By Maureen Dowd

Tom DeLay was icing his foot and resting his booty.

On Monday, his debut as a dancing fool (or just a fool, depending on whom you talk to), he had started at 10 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m., and his pre-stress fracture was acting up.

“It swole up a little bit,” he said, on the phone from Los Angeles. “The doctor says to keep icing it.”

That meant a delay in learning the tango from Cheryl Burke, his partner on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” who blessedly had never heard of the guy once dubbed “The Meanest Man in Congress” when he was first assigned to her.

“Cheryl says the tango’s macho, arrogant and aggressive, and I said, ‘That’s me,’ ” he recalled.

The Hammer, who in rehearsal admitted to feeling like “a complete goose” — and not simply because he had his golf shirt tucked into his sweat pants — is clinging to his Texas machismo even as he follows Cheryl’s instruction to find his “feminine side.”

“I’m being more feminine and a little prissy,” he said, using a word that smacks of über-alpha “I am not gay even though I have on heels and sparkles and want a disco-ball trophy” overcompensation.

“My brain is telling my hips, ‘We don’t do that.’ It’s not like a speech or a press conference. This is exposing your soul.

“At the beginning, I told Cheryl, ‘No rhinestones, no frilly shirts and no pink.’ Well, it didn’t take Cheryl two seconds to put rhinestones on me. And she swears she’s going to put ruffles on me for the tango — probably pink.”

It might be a sign of the apocalypse — a frilly Tom DeLay shimmying away from an indictment and onto “Dancing.” It’s certainly a blazing reminder that in our lowbrow-loving, no-attention-span culture, most any scoundrel can do the redemption tango simply by being a good sport.

“I’m very excited for people to see the real Tom DeLay,” the former House majority leader said. The Hammer vigorously flipped his fanny and played air guitar to the tune of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” a song that came out in the mid-60s when the teenager was starting at Baylor University in Waco.

“I used to gator to this song in my wild days before I was kicked out of Baylor,” he said. “I was so good they nicknamed me ‘Gator.’ ”

No gatoring on campus, though. The Southern Baptist college banned dancing for 151 years, relenting in 1996.

“Somebody gave the school a student union building that had the most beautiful dance floor you ever saw with the provision that if we ever had a dance, they’d tear it down,” he said. “We had our dances off campus in hotel rooms and parking lots.”

So DeLay, 62, cutting loose in his orthopedic shoes with the cha-cha and his Texas mugshot grin, was the Lipitor version of the finale of “Footloose.” The judges gave him tepid scores in Monday’s male dance-off, but a scandal-plagued former Dallas Cowboy and George Hamilton’s glossy son rated lower.

The man whose house was christened “Macho Manor” back in his party-boy, “Hot Tub Tom” days in the Texas Legislature compared looking for his feminine side to “knocking on a closed door.” But he gave it a shot during his cha-cha by winking and pointing at Bruno Tonioli, the effervescently effeminate judge.

“You’re crazier than Sarah Palin!” Bruno shouted when a winded DeLay was done swiveling in a leopard-skin-sequin-trimmed brown get-up.

“I think that’s a great compliment,” DeLay told me afterward.

Once the Hammer tried to outfox Democrats. Now he’s trying to outfox-trot Donny Osmond. Once he whipped Republicans relentlessly to keep their votes in line. Now he says he and his daughter have “a strategy to whip the vote” on “Dancing.”

“Nothing complicated,” he said. “Twitter. Facebook. My daughter taught me how to tweet.”

The former exterminator drove the loony Clinton impeachment, pushed the nutty Terri Schiavo legislation, gutted the House ethics committee, engaged in gerrymandering schemes, enhanced the pay-to-play political culture and made the Republican Party so sulfurously partisan, ethically suspect and God-centric that voters recoiled.

He dropped out of politics in 2006 after a campaign finance violation indictment and ties to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

I asked DeLay about Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a watchdog group that had a “Dancing” watching party at a bar here featuring Hammer-tinis — an occasion to reiterate that DeLay was corrupt and should go to jail.

“I wish I could have gone,” said a cheery DeLay, adding that he’s not worried that his foes will skew the voting. “You can’t vote against somebody. You can only vote for me or somebody else.”

Would he want to be on another reality show?

“No,” he said. “I’d probably end up killing somebody on ‘Big Brother.’