WASHINGTON

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.”