WASHINGTON -- Dick Armey spent eight months last year preparing for a Republican takeover few others believed would happen. But the No. 2 House Republican has found an area he overlooked: coping with life in the limelight.
The majority leader's recent gaffe, in which he referred to openly gay Rep. Barney Frank as "Barney Fag," caused a political uproar from which the seven-term Texan says he has still not recovered.
"I was shocked . . . that nobody would believe me," said Mr. Armey, who contends he simply stumbled over Mr. Frank's name and out came a word that, coincidentally, was a slur against homosexuals.
"When I've screwed up before, I've admitted it. But I didn't, and I said I didn't, and no one would believe me. That hurt."
To his critics, it seemed to fit a pattern for Mr. Armey, who, much like House Speaker Newt Gingrich, suddenly appeared on the national stage this year full of rough edges and hard angles.
"If another member of Congress had said that, people would have considered it a slip of the tongue, but considering Mr. Armey's history of outrageous statements, people were more suspicious," said Howard Wolfson, press secretary for Rep. Nita M. Lowey, a New York Democrat, who attacked Mr. Armey at a news conference shortly after the incident.
Mr. Armey had already accused Hillary Rodham Clinton of hanging around with "Marxists," and he violated House decorum with Democratic colleagues by referring to President Clinton as "your president," not "the president."
He complained during a committee hearing last year on abortion coverage in health care legislation about "fem-centric policies."
"Frankly, we're spending too much time on self-indulgent women who are too . . . careless with their bodies," he said.
But those who know Mr. Armey say there is virtue in his candor.
"What you see in Dick Armey is what you get: He just gives it to you straight," said Mr. Armey's close friend and fellow Texan Tom DeLay, who now serves as majority whip, the No. 3 post in the House. "That's very useful in a floor leader because people know where they stand, but it gets him into trouble."
Before coming to power, the Republicans never considered what it would be like to have their every word subjected to what Mr. Armey called on the House floor "psychoanalysis about my subliminals or about my Freudian predilections."
"It's just not something we gave any thought to," he said in an interview last week. "I guess that led almost inevitably to this cultural shock. It just wasn't in the conventional sense part of what we thought of as doing the job."
Mr. Gingrich, constantly erupting with ideas and random thoughts that have stirred up half a dozen tempests since the election, generated the most controversy with his $4.5 million book deal.
But the speaker manages to keep changing the subject by making four and five public appearances a day. Mr. Armey tends to remain behind the scenes.
A former professor of economics, the 54-year-old Mr. Armey is the ideologue and detail man behind the GOP takeover.
As chairman last year of the House Republican Conference, then the No. 3 post, Mr. Armey drafted much of the Republican "Contract with America." Now, as House majority leader, he has the day-to-day responsibility for the logistics of putting the contract into effect: assigning legislation to committees, scheduling time on the House floor, rounding up votes for passage.
Mr. Armey was so confident of a Republican victory in November that he began planning for the transition months before the election. But he took the task so seriously, he said, that he never allowed himself "a moment of elation to kick up my heels" and shout for joy at his party's triumph.
During the Republicans' first month on the job, the majority leader has spent most of his time locked in meetings and strategy sessions.
His relatively few high-profile appearances, as on the Sunday talk shows, have been marked by the trademark Armey bluntness.
In one case, he acknowledged it would be dangerous to spell out the cuts necessary to balance the budget before passing a balanced budget amendment because the lawmakers' "knees would buckle."
He often even takes a harder stance than Mr. Gingrich, recently declaring, for example, that he would fight Mr. Clinton's proposed increase in the minimum wage "with every fiber of my being."
Mr. Gingrich has said he would allow the president at least the courtesy of hearings on the issue.
But Mr. Armey's staff laments that America knows little of the real man: a soft-spoken teller of corny jokes and "Armey's Axioms," who spends his days dreaming of bass fishing in Piscataway Creek near his home in Prince George's County and is often lonely for his wife, Susan.
It was loneliness, Mr. Armey said, that inspired him to bunk in the House gym when he arrived in Washington 10 years ago. Mrs. Armey remained in Texas while the couple's four children were in school, and the congressman didn't want to pay to rent a Washington apartment he would use only a few nights a week.
But Mr. Armey said he also didn't want to confront the emptiness of an apartment where no one was waiting for him at the end of the day.
He decided to run for Congress a decade ago after watching lawmakers on C-SPAN and concluding that "they sound like a bunch of darn fools."
He spent his first few terms on the back benches with Mr. Gingrich, taking off occasionally on issues like obscenity, including funding by the National Endowment for the Arts.
But Mr. Armey scored a major victory in his third term by devising the successful scheme for closing military bases, which provides for an independent commission to recommend to Congress the politically difficult choices of which ones should go.
By his fifth term, Mr. Armey broke into the top ranks of the Republican leadership, largely because the election of Mr. Clinton had convinced a majority of his colleagues that they should have a sharp-tongued hard-liner as their party spokesman.
But he's never been in the spotlight quite like this, and he's not sure he likes it. "It's very uncomfortable," the majority leader said.