Bye-bye, Barney Rep. Frank shuffles off

By R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

Illustration: Barney Frank by Alexander Hunter for The Washington Times

When Barney Frank announced Monday that he was shuffling offstage after three decades in the congressional limelight, I was brought back to 1980, when some very thoughtful friends from Harvard told me to watch him. Paul H. Weaver had been an aide to Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, which was lustrous in those days, and rightly so. Paul was one of the brightest young neocons of his generation. I always took him seriously. He thought Rep. Frank was principled, stupendously intelligent and of good cheer - a wit. It seemed Mr. Frank was going to be another Daniel Patrick Moynihan or at least an Allard Lowenstein, the former congressman and principled liberal activist who had been murdered recently.
Boy, were Paul and the others up there at Harvard wrong. I followed Mr. Frank’s trajectory for years, and it always proceeded downward. If he was principled, it was the principle of sticking with your team, however far to the left it might go. If he was intelligent, it was the intelligence of the banal. There was never anything fresh or surprising about him. He followed the liberal herd, and if he was clever, it was in implementing the herd’s desiderata. As for wit, all I noticed was a clownish demeanor, somewhat reminiscent of W.C. Fields, though without the booze. A specimen of it was presented on National Public Radio for us to savor the other day. In responding to a contrary constituent in 2009, Mr. Frank said, “Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table.” Oscar Wilde he was not.


In an interview with the New York Times after announcing his forthcoming retirement, he spoke of how a “competition of people of goodwill with different points of view on public policy” had vanished from Congress. He never blamed liberals for that - only Newt Gingrich, the Republicans who had to “demonize the Democrats” to take over Congress, and “the conservative news media.” Oh yes, he also blamed “moderates” who were too moderate to object to the Republicans’ evil designs.
Actually, we conservatives have not changed our views much since Barney Frank entered Congress. There are, however, two things that have changed. The first is that we conservatives have a voice in the public debate, and it is a growing voice. Added to the conservative writers and magazines, we now have talk radio (democratic talk radio) and Fox News. The second is that Mr. Frank and his party have become markedly more liberal. In their immoderation, they display an element of extreme politics that is always present in extremist movements and is sinking liberalism. The liberals always take liberalism too far.
Barney Frank was the first self-proclaimed homosexual in Congress, and as a spokesman for gay rights, he was ardent. Today, homosexuals have their rights, but they want to claim the right to marry, not to sign civil-union papers before the state like those heterosexuals who want a civil union. They want to claim marriage in a church. Will churches be allowed to deny them this right, free from the reach of civil rights law? It is too early to know, but as I watch the treatment of church-run hospitals refusing abortion and church-run adoption agencies treating homosexual couples differently from heterosexual couples, I worry about liberals again going too far.
Certainly, liberals went too far in pushing the extension of subprime mortgages to those who could not afford them. Through all their travails, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had a great protector in Mr. Frank. He was a typical liberal advocate of subprime loans for the penurious. As late as July 2008, he told CNBC, “I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.” Oops! And in 2009, he took over the House Financial Services Committee to work his wizardry on the whole financial industry. The result was the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which took the crony capitalism of Fannie and Freddie to a whole new level.
Barney Frank has cost the taxpaying American people a bundle, and now that the bills are coming due, he is retiring. My guess is he will be richly rewarded on the lecture circuit, where he will lecture liberals on how swell they had it, while others clean up his mess. No, he never made it as a Moynihan or a Lowenstein.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor-in-chief of the American Spectator and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. He is author of “After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery” (Thomas Nelson, 2010).