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Last Updated June 22, 2005
The political transformation of Massachusetts is nowhere better illustrated than in the Boston suburbs of Brookline and Newton. These were Yankee enclaves a century ago, with avenues built to resemble the sweep of Haussmann's Grand Boulevards in Paris, and villages of giant clapboard houses clustered within a few blocks of commuter railroad stations. Brookline was where The Country Club (the very first one) was established in 1882, and where Joseph Kennedy, an Irish Catholic 20-something banker seeking respectability, moved his family in 1914. Brookline and Newton then were solidly Republican in politics, the political base of leading politicians like Christian Herter, governor of Massachusetts and U.S. secretary of state in the 1950s; as late as 1960, Brookline and Newton and adjacent wards of Boston were electing a Republican congressman. Then came the transformation, personified by the election in 1962 of Michael Dukakis at 29 to the Great and General Court (the legislature). As Massachusetts's university-educated classes became more liberal, as Brookline's and Newton's Jewish populations grew, and as young liberal-minded families refurbished the graceful old houses, these towns became Democratic bastions. Brookline and Newton, are the part of the liberal heart of Massachusetts: They voted 75%-20% for Bill Clinton in 1996, 73%-19% for Al Gore in 2000 and 77%-22% for John Kerry in 2004. The 4th Congressional District of Massachusetts includes Brookline and Newton, which are the political home bases for its congressman, Barney Frank. Anchoring the hook-like northern tip of the district, they account for less than one-quarter of the district's votes. The shape results from successive redistrictings: In 1982, Frank's district was extended south to the old textile mill city of Fall River; in 1992, it lost much of Fall River and gained New Bedford, a great 19th century whaling port and still home to one of the largest fishing fleets in the United States, with the largest percentage of Portuguese-Americans in the nation; in 2002, it kept New Bedford and regained most of Fall River. Brookline and Newton are connected to the rest of the district by an attenuated series of towns--Wellesley, Dover, Sherborn, Millis, Norfolk, Sharon--and at some points the district is only a mile wide. This is a Democratic district in national politics, but not as Democratic or as uniformly culturally liberal as Brookline and Newton; in state politics it is more marginal: the suburban towns between Newton and Fall River voted for Republican Governor Mitt Romney in 2002. There is a bit of most kinds of America here: high-income WASPy Wellesley, French-Canadian mill-worker Fall River, Foxboro with its football stadium, Sharon with a middle-income Jewish population and countrified Dover. Barney Frank, first elected to the House in 1980, is one of the intellectual and political leaders of the Democratic Party in the House--political theorist and pit bull all at the same time. In Washingtonian's biennial polls of House staffers, he is consistently voted the brainiest and the funniest member of the House by wide margins. He grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, and went to Harvard, where he got to know local politicians as well as political scientists. In 1967, he went to work for newly elected Boston Mayor Kevin White; in 1971, he went to Washington to work for Congressman Michael Harrington. In 1972, Frank was elected to the Massachusetts House from the Back Bay of Boston, then just starting to be a liberal singles neighborhood. In 1980, when Congressman Robert Drinan retired after Pope John Paul II commanded Jesuits to leave elective office, Frank moved to Brookline and ran in the 4th District. With a strong base in Brookline and Newton, he won. After redistricting threw him in with Republican incumbent Margaret Heckler in 1982, he beat her 60%-40%. He has been re-elected by wide margins since. In the House, Frank quickly gained a reputation as one of the smartest talkers and best debaters in the chamber--maybe one of the best of all time. Frank listens to others' arguments and engages them in his inimitable rapid-fire delivery. While he stands at the left end of the American electoral spectrum, there is an element of solid small-c conservatism beneath him. More recently he said he is for ''capitalism plus,'' that is, market capitalism with welfare state protections, and he has expressed unease at what he considers increasing isolationism in Congress, though in 2002 he opposed the Iraq war resolution. Frank has worked hard, often behind the scenes, on many substantive issues. He has shaped immigration acts since 1986, working to expand legal immigration, to allow HIV-positive people to enter the country, to bar states from excluding children of illegal aliens from school and to change the 1996 law that required mandatory deportation of immigrants convicted of a crime carrying a one-year sentence even if the offense occurred many years ago; this had been hurting Azorean and Cape Verdean immigrants in New Bedford. With Banking Committee Republican Spencer Bachus he worked hard for debt relief for very poor countries. After the 1998 election, Frank took the ranking position on Banking's Housing Subcommittee. In 2002, he worked cooperatively with Financial Services Chairman Michael Oxley on housing issues, including a program to help teachers, police officers and fire fighters make down payments on houses in the communities where they work. In January 2003 he became ranking Democrat on the full Banking Committee. Frank calls himself a "free market guy," but with limits. "That comes from looking at the world. You see the market works well at some things, but not others. … Left to itself, the market will create more inequality than is necessary for efficiency or than is healthy. The job of the Democrats is to reduce inequality where it's not socially healthy." His own preference--to tax wealth "a fairly small percentage" and use the proceeds "to employ people on socially useful purposes"--he recognizes as politically unfeasible now, and so he went on to master parts of the Banking Committee's jurisdiction with which he was unfamiliar--securities, corporate governance, accounting issues, insurance, flood insurance. With Republican Paul Gillmor he sponsored a bill to prevent Wal-Mart from using industrial loan companies to get into the banking business. He has opposed preempting state laws on predatory lending and sought bipartisan support for protecting people against unscrupulous nonprofit credit counseling agencies. He worked with Republicans on flood insurance and check truncation and prepared to do so on identity theft. Affordable housing has been a longtime Frank cause, and he called the practice of allowing Section 8 units and others to go out of the subsidized inventory "the worst failure of this administration." He seeks to produce more subsidized units. He sought to allow merged thrifts to maintain multiple memberships in Home Loan banks, to maintain their affordable housing accounts. In 2003 he put pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do more on manufactured housing loans and affordable housing. Long a supporter of Freddie and Fannie, he joined Oxley in June 2004 in supporting higher funding for their regulator OFHEO and in September joined Oxley in seeking power to subpoena top Fannie executives. But in November, after the HUD Inspector General raised questions about OFHEO's highly critical report on Fannie Mae's accounting, he dropped his support of additional OFHEO funding until the IG's issues were addressed. Still, this seems to be one of the House's more bipartisan committees. When Frank was concerned about Bank of America's elimination of jobs after it absorbed FleetBoston, Oxley agreed to conduct hearings on the effect of bank mergers on local economies. For all his professional accomplishments, Frank's personal life once threatened to end his career. In May 1987, in a seemingly casual answer to a reporter's question, Frank disclosed that he is gay. Then in August 1989, the conservative Washington Times reported that Frank had employed as a personal aide a male prostitute and convicted drug possessor, Steve Gobie, and let him live in his apartment. When faced with a scandal that threatened to end his career, Frank told the truth. He admitted paying Gobie, but was careful never to use official or campaign funds; he denied that he tolerated prostitution in his apartment and said he had thrown the man out when he suspected it was going on. Frank called on the ethics committee to investigate. It did and dismissed all but two minor charges. The committee recommended a reprimand, but not censure; Frank agreed in a contrite appearance before the House in July 1990 and the House voted 287-141 against censure. The vote for reprimand was 408-18. ''I think members will agree that I have always had a reputation for honesty, not always tact or tolerance,'' Frank said to the House. That reputation was one reason he survived and has thrived in the House; his brains, liberal stands, hard work and constituency service helped him not only survive, but become overwhelmingly popular in the 4th District. In 1998, as the House debated the impeachment of Bill Clinton, Frank acknowledged that Clinton lied in his deposition in the Paula Jones case, but ridiculed the case against him. Yet he was harshly critical of Bill Clinton's last minute pardons and in February 2001 proposed a constitutional amendment to prevent the president from using the pardoning power from a month before the presidential election until inauguration day. Frank has been the House's leading legislator on gay rights issues. One was the issue, raised in the 1992 campaign by Bill Clinton and not by Frank or by gay advocacy groups, of gays in the military. To the disappointment of many in the gay community, Frank admitted that allowing open homosexuals to serve in the military would not be accepted by most in Congress or the Pentagon. In the years since, Frank has criticized the military when the number of service members discharged for homosexuality increased, and he helped persuade Al Gore to come out against "Don't ask, Don't tell" in 1999. Frank and Republican Christopher Shays have sponsored a bill to prohibit employment discrimination on account of sexuality, which gained a surprising degree of support in the Republican House. He spoke out against provisions of the faith-based charities act that would allow charities to discriminate against gay people in violation of state or local laws. Frank hailed the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's decision in November 2003 that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage. But he was critical of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's promotion of what turned out to be illegal same-sex marriages there. "I was against pretend marriage," he explained later. It was "political hoopla with no gain. We had [Governor Mitt Romney] at the time basically threatening not to follow the law [the Supreme Judicial Court decision]. Our response was, 'What are you, George Wallace? You can't do that. You can't have civil disobedience.' It totally undercut our argument to have Newsom also talking about not following the law." After George W. Bush's reelection victory and the passage of same-sex marriage bans in 11 states in November 2004, he reflected further, "The thing that agitated people were the mass weddings. It was a mistake in San Francisco, compounded by people in Oregon, New Mexico and New York. What it did was provoke a lot of fears. He created a sense there was chaos rather than give us a chance to show, as we have in Massachusetts, that this doesn't mean anything to anyone else." But he took satisfaction in the fact that the House fell far short in September 2004 of approving the Family Marriage Amendment. He was pleased that the Log Cabin Republicans declined to support Bush, and he noted that every Massachusetts legislator who supported same-sex marriage was reelected. He has often said "we would do better with fewer marches and rallies," and in December 2004 he said advocates of gay rights should pick fights sensibly. "You take risks for your gains, but you don't take risks for no gains." Through all his work on national issues, Frank has not neglected the home front. He has worked especially hard on projects in Fall River and New Bedford. All of this seems to have paid off in the polls. In 2004 he was opposed by a former radio talk show host who claims that changes Frank made in the immigration laws in the 1980s allowed the legal entry of the 9/11 hijackers; Frank said that was nonsense and that they could and should have been barred under existing law. In the last weeks of the campaign Frank spent $350,000 on television--not because he was at risk of losing, but to give him more exposure should John Kerry be elected president and should he run for Kerry's Senate seat. Frank won his House race 78%-22%; he carried every city and town, including four towns which voted for George W. Bush.
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