Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (10 page)

Our coalition of Republicans, liberals, and mavericks held together in the face of heavy pressure, and Sargent’s veto was sustained. Two significant consequences ensued. First, the state’s Democratic leaders chose to establish the state’s first black Senate district at the expense of suburban liberals—especially, and not entirely incidentally, Jewish suburban liberals. The city of Newton and the town of Brookline, with heavy populations of Jews, were merged into one district. As the leadership viewed it, if we liberals were so eager to give the blacks a Senate seat, we could give them one of ours. The newly configured districts also left Bulger in strong shape. He lost the black voters in his district and gained white liberal voters from my own part of the city. This suited him perfectly well. As before, he could keep Irish voters in South Boston unified behind him by warning of the danger that a non-Southie candidate could win the seat.

A future consequence of the redistricting was also a form of liberal punishing, aimed entirely at me. Eight years later, Bulger’s fury at my role had not diminished. When the Massachusetts congressional delegation was reduced by one after the 1980 census, he was by then Senate president. He used his powers to dismantle my district in the U.S. House of Representatives—in a manner that left most people, myself included, convinced that I would not survive.

Although my defiance of Bulger and the other entrenched Democratic leaders would cost me later on, it required no great political courage at the time. Neither did my advocacy of other political positions that were in varying degrees unpopular and unconventional. I was in a unique political situation. Given the unusual nature of the district I represented, I was very unlikely to lose my seat. Given my own unusual nature, I was equally unlikely to win any other. Being unbeatable where I was, and unelectable anywhere else, gave me that rare political commodity: the freedom that comes from having nothing left to lose. I took full advantage of my wholly secure electoral position in my first reelection campaign. We turned a photo in which I appeared somewhat disheveled into a poster that read
NEATNESS ISN’T EVERYTHING.
I was learning the political benefits of humorous self-denigration when it came to unimportant parts of my persona.

As I hoped, I was able to enhance my electoral strength with constituent service. Grateful for my help with the city’s subway finances, Kevin White invited me to pick a project that would benefit my constituents—and, of course, myself in turn. That is why Commonwealth Avenue, one of America’s most beautiful avenues, is lit at night by elegant and expensive electric lights that combine modern illumination with an architecturally appropriate nineteenth-century appearance.

At year’s end, Bartley confirmed my status as a liberal trusted by the leadership when he named me to the Ways and Means Committee. This was largely symbolic. Although the committee was very important, it had no real decision-making power because the leadership tightly controlled everything. But joining it was an important symbol of my acceptance. Among other things, it was proof that “the gay thing” was on no one’s radar screen but mine.

It was now time for another career decision. I was still convinced that I was holding the only elected office I could ever hope to win. I also knew that as much as I enjoyed that job, ten years in it would be enough. For one thing, it paid barely enough to live on—most members had other sources of income. And although the jurisdiction was interesting, state governments in America operate within tight constraints. It is at the federal level—then and now—that the major economic questions are addressed. I was pretty sure that after ten years in the Statehouse, I would be ready to move on.

But only if I had something else to do. Once again, I made a career choice under the influence of someone else. Alexander Cella was an ethnic street pol with a first-rate mind and a profound commitment to liberalism. He had been a state representative from blue-collar Medford but had lost a primary to a bus driver whose popularity, rumor went, was based in part on his willingness to depart from his route and drop passengers at their doors. Cella was promptly hired as a policy aide to the Speaker and became a lawyer. One evening in December 1973, when I ran into him as I was leaving the office, he volunteered that I ought to follow his example.

After very little thought, I agreed. I do not necessarily concur with the oft-given advice that aspiring policy makers should go to law school. In Congress, I found economics far more useful, and I also wish I had forced myself to take more courses in accounting—the language in which political debates about both taxation and spending are most often conducted. But while economic thinking was most relevant to both city and national governing, lawyering is at the core of state government. It is at the state level that most of the laws governing personal and economic conduct are adopted. Crime, domestic relations, property ownership, retail transactions—these are all largely state matters.

In addition, I knew that becoming a lawyer would help me cope with one persistent form of obfuscation I encountered in my dealings with defenders of various status quos. “Why don’t we do it this way?” I would propose on some issue. “You can’t do that,” somebody’s counsel would tell me. “Why can’t we?” I would ask. “Are you a lawyer?” was the frequent response. When I answered that I wasn’t, there followed the condescending debate stopper: “Then you wouldn’t understand.”

With these thoughts in mind, I entered Harvard Law School in the fall of 1974. Three years later, when I was asked if I was a lawyer and I replied that I was, I found that “You can’t do that” quickly became, “Well, you
could
do that, but it wouldn’t be a good idea.” (At that point, economics often became relevant.)

I continued my legislative work and constituency service without any crises, even after Bartley was replaced as Speaker by Tom McGee, a much more conservative politician who was much less tolerant of dissent. Unexpectedly—and unsettlingly—my next major political struggle was not with the House leadership, nor the Republicans, but with a man I greatly admired: Michael Dukakis.

Over the previous decade, he had emerged as the most effective progressive in Massachusetts politics, and in 1974 he was elected governor. As he prepared to take office, he’d asked me to be his secretary of transportation. I was torn. This was a very attractive offer. I expected that Dukakis would lead a successful and progressive administration. And the time was ripe. Democrats, especially liberals, had done very well in the post-Watergate elections. If Richard Nixon’s finely tuned political instincts led him to push for an expanded government role in health care, some form of national minimum income, and our first serious environmental policy, while, to top it all off, telling a reporter that he was “now a Keynesian,” the odds were overwhelming that the newly reempowered Democratic majorities could make major advances on our policy agenda. I foresaw the coming of a liberal version of the Era of Good Feeling.

But two considerations led me to turn down the offer. Most important, I had just been reelected to a second term, and I wasn’t ready to give up my seat. Second, taking a full-time job would have meant leaving law school after only one semester. I was not happy at the prospect of adding another busted academic effort to my phantom pursuit of a Ph.D. Fortunately, Dukakis ended up giving the position to our intellectual leader in the antihighway fight, Fred Salvucci. Technical mastery of transportation issues and a level of political skill not always present in great engineers allowed him to do the job much better than I would have.

Another beneficial result of my decision became clear a few months into Dukakis’s term: I would not have to resign from his administration. It turned out that my reading of the political mood, both nationally and in our state, could not have been more wrong. Analysts have given a number of reasons for the popular turn against government, including the distrust brought on by Vietnam, the violent expression of African American disappointment at the lingering impact of racism and the angry white reaction to it, the spectacle of a vice president forced out of office for tawdry corruption, and the disregard of democratic rules by a president. While all of these factors contributed to the growing rejection of collective action, I believe the single biggest cause was the one later summed up by the Clinton campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

By the mid-1970s, the enormous advantage America had enjoyed over every other economy in the world since World War II was eroding rapidly. This decline had two major components—the reindustrialization of the developed economies and the growing assertiveness of the oil-producing nations.

While the former was to have more profound long-term effects, the latter was felt with greater immediacy. Indeed, the recession that followed the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 hit Massachusetts particularly hard. I broke with Dukakis over how the state government should react to that recession. With our economy slumping, we did not have enough revenue to support the current level of public expenditure. I publicly and privately insisted that Dukakis seek a tax increase, not to avoid any cutbacks but at least to minimize them. But he had campaigned on what he called “a lead pipe guarantee” not to raise taxes. Instead, he proposed significant reductions in various state-funded welfare payments. He also proposed cuts that I supported, involving government waste and patronage. But in the absence of increased tax revenue, it was clear that the poorest people in the state would bear much of the burden.

Pushing for higher taxes instead of cutting welfare payments is rarely a preferred platform for elected officials. Given the socioeconomic composition of those who regularly go to the polls, it essentially means asking those who do vote to give some of their money to those who don’t. This usually does not win elections (although Mitt Romney did demonstrate in 2012 that a candidate can define the recipient class so broadly, and make the political point so crudely, that the electoral math reverses).

By the late spring of 1975, I had become known as the leading liberal in the budget fight. My African American colleagues advanced the same position, but the language of political analysts—then and now—curiously treats “blacks” and “liberals” as separate, albeit usually allied, factions. My best guess is that this reflects the implicit assumption that blacks are supposed to support civil rights and aid for the poor, so that referring to them as “liberals” would be redundant.

I failed to defeat Dukakis’s cuts to the state’s General Relief fund and failed as well to protect the mostly elderly recipients of Supplemental Security Income. I had expected to win that last fight but lost it, 112 to 123. This was an early, powerful indication that my post-Watergate hopes for a new Great Society had been unrealistic.

Dukakis ultimately accepted the need for tax increases, and to his credit he did so knowing he would pay a political price. I joined in the effort to pass the increases, but my disaffection with him remained. Perhaps ironically, his commitment to intellectual integrity exacerbated my feeling. Like another leader I greatly respected, Al Lowenstein, he had a deep-seated reluctance to do anything important for largely political reasons.

I can think of only one elected official in our history who showed a total, unflinching immunity to the attractions of reelection. Montana’s Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to the U.S. House—in 1916, two years after Montana established woman suffrage and three years before the nation followed suit. On firm principle, she voted against declaring World War I (as it was not then called) and lost the next election. Twenty-two years later, with distaste for European entanglements at a peak, she won a second term. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she was the only member of Congress to vote against declaring World War II, and promptly lost the next time around. She was a woman of complete integrity and rotten luck—a pacifist who could not win an election without the country almost immediately going to war.

Compared to most elected officials, Dukakis and Lowenstein only rarely seemed to take positions because those positions conformed to public opinion. The problem was that neither man could admit any fallibility even to himself. Consequently, they would proudly defend their ill-chosen views on the merits. Given their great persuasive power, and the respect they’d earned from ideological allies, the regrettable result was increased support for the proposition in question. And so Dukakis did not simply propose welfare cuts as an unfortunate political necessity. He also went on to explain why benefit cuts were not so bad—which would only make it harder to undo them later!

Even as I championed government spending, I did recognize the need to improve how the money was spent. All those dollars wasted by the fabled three horsemen of the fiscal apocalypse—fraud, waste, and abuse—meant less money to run a good transit system or provide an adequate minimum income for the truly needy. And in two areas I took the lead in achieving reform. There was undeniable evidence that some recipients of income transfer programs were double-dipping, so I proposed legislation mandating the computerization of recipient lists. This would allow cross matching to catch those who were illegally benefiting from participating in multiple programs. To my annoyance, several of my allies on the left objected, confirming the unfortunate correlation between deep compassion and political obtuseness that afflicts some of the advocacy community. But they had no votes, and the system became law, with both political and substantive benefits.

The fight for better spending practices in the transit system was much tougher. The law governing compensation for union members mandated binding arbitration for all contracts, in practice ruling out any way to take fiscal constraints into account. When the power to set expenditures is separated from the responsibility to pay for them, all kinds of mischief are likely to ensue.

In 1978, I sponsored a bill that repealed compulsory arbitration. After a long, bitter struggle with the politically sophisticated and well-organized transit workers’ union, the bill passed. The reforms worked, and they set the stage for the expansion of the system rather than its shrinkage. But the workers were furious, and I bore much of the brunt of their anger.