POLITICS Dr. No

IT IS BILLED AS A PRESS CONFERENCE but it is really more like a revival meeting. The room in the Longworth House office building is full of public housing residents from around the country who applaud enthusiastically, periodically shouting out their blessings like elder church women captivated by a sermon.

The message of the day is public housing reform, specifically the need to turn over the management of housing projects to the people who live in them, and the group clearly likes what it is hearing. One speaker, who apologizes for not being active in 1955 when Rosa Parks launched the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat, says to a standing ovation that the tenant power movement is phase two of the civil rights movement.

Another speaker lacks the first’s rhythm, but still strikes all the right chords. “We have spent billions of dollars to put people in miserable squalor,” he announces. Again the crowd erupts.

Both speakers are white, male, and Republican. That’s surprising enough. But the second one is Richard Armey, Dr. No himself, the former economics professor and now arch-conservative con-gressman who represents Arlington and Denton, and that pushes the scene into the ozone of the absurd.

This is the same Dick Armey who bumped Tom Vandergriff out of Congress in 1984, thanks in part to a campaign comic book in which he proudly portrayed himself as the enemy of labor unions, special interest groups, gays, abortion, gun control, and the Equal Rights Amendment. This is the lone Texan who voted against a recent flag protection bill on the grounds that he didn’t think it went far enough. This is the crusader against indecent art; the loose cannon on the House floor; the rogue, right-wing pedant. The man whose alienation from the Democratic-ruled House is evident even when he is asleep: to show his disdain for Washington “insiders,-1 Armey has refused to rent a residence in the District of Columbia; instead, he steeps on a rollaway bed in his congressional office.

What’s he doing at this revival-style meeting? Is this a sign of creeping mellowness in the man who was once the most right-wing “aginner” in the Congress? Or, more likely, has Armey just found a new problem caused by his eternal nemesis, Big Government?

Robert Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, offers one explanation. “Dick Armey may not have public housing in his district, but he has it in his heart.”

Asked about his strange new bedfellows, Armey says that an interest in public housing reform is consistent with the conservative philosophy and has roots in his own upbringing. As a child in North Dakota, he was taught the importance and dignity of the individual’s right to control his life. “The most precious thing you have in this country is the right to be your own person and never give that up,” he says.

After due obeisance to his mother and father, Armey moves on to his mentors in the field of economics-names like Milton Friedman, Joseph Schumpeter, and James Buchanan. As they would say, government is an inefficient provider of housing. To which Armey would add that the government is an inefficient provider of anything except jobs for bureaucrats. “The market’s rational,” Armey says. “The government’s dumb.”

Another explanation for Armey’s new cause would have to include his love of doing the unexpected and his knack for getting attention. In only his fifth year in Washington, he has been nationally spotlighted twice- first for legislation he sponsored to close the country’s most antiquated military bases, and again this summer when he fired the first shots in the controversy over funding the National Endowment for the Arts.

Armey can soapbox with the best of them. Like a growing number of Republicans who have seen the efficacy of such political media manipulators as Roger Ailes and Lee At-water, Armey thinks nothing of distorting and simplifying enemies’ records in a crass attempt to get votes when he has to, and playing the reasoned public policy analyst when he wants to. As with the schizophrenic George Bush of the 198S campaign, there are two Dick Armeys-the thoughtful econ-omist, and the comic book crusader striding through a world of simple black and white.

Armey’s campaign comic, which must be the only one in pulp history to feature detailed footnotes, was inserted into newspapers during his 1984 race. In a typical broadside, Armey declared: “the liberal intellectuals believe that in the Sixties God died and left them in charge. But God didn’t die, and he certainly didn’t leave them in charge!” To illustrate why joining Armey’s Army was the right thing to do, he invented two average 26th District voters who, apparently blessed with the day off, conducted a running dialogue about the candidates:

First Voter: “So you mean that Vander-wheeze |Vandergriff] is really looking out for Democrats and their special interests, instead of us?”

Second Voter: “Right! His buddies, Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright, have the ultimate control over him.”

Armey’s version of his political rise also smacks of the mythic simplicity of a pulp hero. He says proudly that he is the only congressman to get elected after watching C-Span (“I said ’heck, I can do what those guys are doing’”). Later he reminds a visitor that he hails from a town called Cando (pronounced can-do). He keeps his father’s spurs on his office wall. And some of his colleagues say his large build and curly brown hair remind them of Victor Mature, the he-man actor who starred in such vintage classics as Samson and Delilah.

In his highly visible assault on the National Endowment for the Arts this summer, Armey played a crusading defender of mainstream values. He was indignant that taxpayer money would go toward an exhibit such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s, which included one photograph of a fist fully inserted into an anus, and another of a man urinating into another man’s mouth. He proposed docking the NEA 10 percent of its annual funding for what he perceived as an egregious violation of the canons of good taste. He came close to succeeding before a slap-on-the-wrist $45,000 cut was offered as a compromise.

Off the soapbox, Armey the economist-while he is by no means an advocate of ho-moerotic art-prefers to put the debate in terms of what is and what is not the proper role of government. In his view; funding any artistic endeavor with taxpayer dollars, be it Our Town or Torch Song Trilogy, is a dubious proposition.

“If you come from the intellectual tradition that I come from, you’re being awfully generous to allow, to accept, that we should in any way spend scarce federal dollars on such an unnecessary luxury,” he says.

But while Armey would gladly do away with the NEA as well as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he prefers not to single out any particular artist or exhibit for reproach. In fact, he professes a healthy respect for artistic freedom.

“I happen to believe that it is imperative that you have freedom of expression in the arts,” he says. “I also happen to believe that it is not appropriate and it is dangerous for the government to control or broadly affect what art is funded and what is not.”

So why, in the flap over Mapplethorpe, did he labor to have the government do just what he says government should not do? Dick Armey the crusader shrugs off the question. “One of the things you learn is to spend your time on what is doable.”

Uh-oh. Doable. Politics, after all, is the art of the possible, but it’s different for a right-of-Goldwater man who’s built a career out of unflinching battle with The Enemy and proudly lined up on the losing side of some of the most lopsided votes in House history. There’s talk that Dick Armey might become just another go-along-to-get-along politician. Some colleagues are saddened by the change. Others are all smiles.

“He has become a much more tolerant person to work with,” says Rep. John Bryant, the liberal Democrat who represents East Dallas. “He hasn’t changed his views, but he is much more effective because he’s more tolerant and able to compromise.”

There are definite signs of a change in Armey’s ways since he came to Congress. He still prides himself on his fierce independence, making a point never to refer to “my” chairman or “my” ranking member or even “my” president. Still, for the last couple of years he has been wheeling and dealing with “his” minority leader to get a spot on the very powerful House Rules Committee. Republican leadership, initially wary of Armey’s volatility, is paying more attention to him, calling on his technical expertise to spearhead the party’s plan for Social Security reform, among other things.

Armey is also developing quite a political machine. In 1984, his candidacy was laughed at by some. He beat the once-popular Vandergriff, a former mayor of Arlington, by just 6,900 votes in a Reagan landslide. In 1986 and 1988, however, he crushed the oppo by two-to-one margins. Now he’s in an enviable position: secure in his own seat, he’s become a heavy contributor to fellow Republicans. Leading up to the 1988 election he gave out $82,117 in cash and kind to PACs all over the country, aiding virtually every Republican congressional candidate who was not a shoo-in.

The biggest change, though, could come if Armey sticks with his current plans and moves into a Washington apartment with his second wife, Susan. The move would be for personal reasons; the one drawback to the job of congressman is missing dinner and morning coffee with Susan during the time he is in Washington, says Armey, whose youngest son is already settled into college. Armey swears he won’t become tainted, won’t be transformed by insidious pod people into a Beltway bureaucrat.

He’s probably right. Even so, it may be the closing of a chapter in comic book history.