Barney Frank – Media Nation

A new financial crisis may be brewing — and, this time, there isn’t a Barney Frank in sight

*Barney Frank. Photo (cc) 2012 by U.S. Department of Agriculture.*

The devolution of our political culture is perhaps best summed up in this passage from David Shribman’s Boston Globe obituary of Barney Frank, the legendary progressive congressman who died Tuesday evening:

Mr. Frank was involved in two bailout efforts to battle the 2008 economic crisis, first for foundering financial services institutions and then for the nation’s automobile companies.

“If Barney had not been chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the financial crisis, I shudder to think what would have happened to our economy,” said Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs who served as President George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary during the meltdown. “He was in the right spot at the right time.”

Now we are dealing with what looks a lot like a tech bubble plus mounting economic pressures from Donald Trump’s illegal war against Iran — and there isn’t a Barney Frank in sight.

I also found this Shribman sentence particularly graceful:

Through more than a half-century of political activism, political agitation, political campaigning, and political maneuvering, his presence on the left in Massachusetts politics exceeded the combined left field tenure of Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski in Fenway Park.

Today Frank is probably best known as the first member of Congress to come out as gay voluntarily. But there was a lot more to his career than that. His work stretched back many decades, and it was consequential.

I’m old enough to remember when Frank was a top aide to Boston Mayor Kevin White and, later, a member of the state legislature. He was elected to Congress for the first time in 1980, when he succeeded Father Robert Drinan, himself a progressive legend. Two years later, he defeated moderate Republican Margaret Heckler in a battle of incumbent House members, a situation forced by reapportionment. He continued to serve until 2013, when he was succeeded by Joe Kennedy III.

I think I only interviewed Frank once, briefly, while I was at The Boston Phoenix. Frank was notoriously abrupt with reporters, so I tried to steel myself — but he must have been in a good mood that day. What I remember is that I’d asked for his thoughts on a story I was writing, and he called me back from outside a committee hearing. I’m paraphrasing, but he began something like this: A Democrat’s talking, so I’ve got a few minutes. I only have to pay attention when it’s a Republican.

There won’t be another one like Barney Frank.

Barney Frank, the unrepentant $2.4 million crypto bro

Give us a break, Barney. Meanwhile, I hope and expect The Boston Globe is going to dig deeply into what Frank was doing at Signature. From The New York Times:

Mr. Frank, who received more than $2.4 million in cash and stock from Signature during his seven-plus years on the board, left the job on Sunday as regulators dissolved the board. He said on Monday that the bank was the victim of overzealous regulators. “We were the ones who they shot to encourage others to stay away from crypto,” he said.

Bush speechwriter: A “disaster” for Republicans

Later this week I’ll be writing more about the historic health-care bill passed by the House on Sunday night. For now, though, a few semi-connected observations.

1. If you read nothing else on the politics of health-care reform, you must read this blog post by David Frum, a Republican strategist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush. Frum doesn’t like the bill; he thinks it’s too expensive and will harm businesses. But he is withering in his criticism of the Republican leadership for its take-no-prisoners approach to legislation that is, he asserts, moderate at its core and based on Republican ideas.

“Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s,” he begins. “It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster.” He continues:

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo — just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

Every line is quotable, so by all means read the whole thing. But he is especially strong on the strategic error Republicans made in following the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, noting that not only do they want Democrats to fail, but, fundamentally, they want Republicans to fail, too. Why? It’s good for business.

2. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman today connects the dots between opposition to health-care reform and race. It’s not hard: All he has to do is quote former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who recently said passage would be as harmful to Democrats as civil-rights legislation was in the 1960s. [See correction below.]

Gingrich’s clear message was that white opposition to racial justice was good for the Republican Party, and happy days are here again. And Krugman offers a few other choice examples as well.

The racial subtext to health-care reform has been right below the surface all along. Let’s not forget that South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson, who bellowed “You lie!” at President Obama last September, has a long and foul history of involvement in Confederate causes. This weekend, the tea-party protesters included someone holding up a racially charged poster of Obama as a voodoo doctor (I’ve lost track of where I found it, but if you’ve got a link, send it along), and of some flinging the N-word at Congressman John Lewis, a legendary civil-rights leader. (Homophobic slurs were directed at Congressman Barney Frank as well.)

You can’t even bring this stuff up without being criticized for characterizing a group based on the actions of a few, and I do understand that argument. But if anyone on the scene tried to stop or shout down these knuckle-draggers, their efforts have gone unrecorded.

3. As the media play their favorite parlor game of picking winners and losers, they ought to consider that the biggest loser of all might prove to be Congressman Steve Lynch of South Boston.

Lynch, as we know, announced his opposition to the Senate bill last week. No surprise there — a lot of House Democrats didn’t like it, which is why they came up with the complex strategy of approving the Senate bill, then approving a set of amendments to send back to the Senate.

But Lynch backed himself into a corner with strong language that made it almost impossible for him to shift. By Sunday, the emotional momentum had clearly turned, and Lynch had nowhere to go. He wound up being one of just two House members to vote against the Senate bill and for the amendments — a move that may have put him on the “right” side both times, but that was transparently craven. (So why did the “yes” tally rise by just one, from 219 to 220? Believe it or not, someone voted “yes” on the Senate bill and “no” on the amendments. Go figure.)

The talk today is whether a progressive Democrat might challenge Lynch in the primary. That’s happened before without much effect. This time, though, Lynch could face an opponent who can raise money from the netroots, and without his erstwhile friends in organized labor to drag him over the finish line.

Sounded like a good idea at the time, eh, Congressman?

Correction: Krugman relied on a Washington Post story, and the Post has now published a correction. Gingrich says he was referring to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society social programs and the Vietnam War, not to civil-rights legislation.

Photo of David Frum via Wikimedia Commons.