Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (17 page)

When I saw Kevin Poirier, a Republican state rep I’d been friendly with, he said it must feel good to know that I’d be able to keep my congressional seat for as long as I wanted. My estimate at the time was that I would stay until I turned seventy-five, in 2015. This was one of my better attempts at a personal prediction: I was only two years off.

*

If 1982 was a good year for my political fortunes, it was also a good year for my party and political philosophy. The Democrats won twenty-six seats in the House—the electorate, it seemed, was unwilling to dismantle the legacy of the New Deal and its successors. To the pleasant surprise of many of us, given the choice between Tip O’Neill, the symbol of that tradition, and Ronald Reagan, its archenemy, the voters chose O’Neill.

There was one important danger signal I failed to notice sufficiently at the time. The administration claimed that its tax cuts would stimulate the economy so much that overall government revenues would increase. “Supply-side economics,” as it was called, was economically controversial but politically appealing. The doctrine’s adherents could finesse the choice between lowering taxes and slashing spending. It was a way to eat your cake and have it and add another layer. The main problem with the idea would later be articulated by one of the leading conservative economists of the period, Alan Greenspan. When he was asked at a hearing if it was possible to increase government revenue by cutting tax rates, he replied, “That is theoretically true, Congressman, but it hasn’t happened in my lifetime.” He was then in his late seventies.

In 1981, David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, proposed an alternative rationale for the tax cuts. He explained his position in an unusually honest interview he gave to William Greider in
The Atlantic
magazine, who summarized it thus: “Stockman was buoyant about the political implications of the tax legislation: first, because it put a tightening noose around the size of the government.”

Stockman later explained why this was the only effective way to restrain the growth of government in his book
The Triumph of Politics
:

Lavish Social Security benefits, wasteful dairy subsidies, futile UDAG [Urban Development Action] grants, and all the remainder of the federal subventions do not persist solely due to weak-kneed politicians or the nefarious graspings of special-interest groups … Congressmen and senators ultimately deliver what their constituencies demand …
The Wall Street Journal
somehow … manages to divine a great unwashed mass of the citizenry demanding the opposite of the spending agendas presented by the Claude Peppers, the homebuilders’ lobby, and the other hired guns of K Street … The actual electorate, however,… is interested in getting help from the government to compensate for a perceived disadvantage.

In other words, “starving the beast” was the best available way to curtail popular government programs.

Stockman’s outburst of inconvenient truth telling discomfited the Reaganites, and the president did rebuke him—avuncularly, and in recognition of Stockman’s great talent, with no diminution in his authority. More important, as skepticism about supply-side economics grew, conservatives implicitly adopted Stockman’s rationale. Tax cuts, which were originally hailed in part because they could
increase
the government’s revenues, were now fervently supported precisely because they would have the opposite effect.

Conservatives had discovered a potent strategy. They would not mount a frontal attack on the public sector; instead, they would use the public’s aversion to taxation to trump its affection for spending. The approach was bolstered by two additional bipartisan beliefs—the assumptions that the American way of life was seriously threatened by large budget deficits and by hostile forces in the world. The first of these beliefs called for smaller federal budgets, the second demanded that a very large share of those budgets go to the military.

Taken together, these political currents severely constrained our capacity to work through government to improve the quality of domestic life. The social safety net, public safety, improvements to our infrastructure, well-funded education, environmental protection, health care and health research—all of these vital causes had to compete against the popularity of tax cuts, balanced budgets, and military expenditures.

This competition for resources would set the overarching terms of political debate in the country for thirty years, and it continues to do so today. Tax cutting won a major victory when Walter Mondale’s call for more revenue to sustain our quality of life played a major role in his devastating defeat in 1984. The protax side did win a victory with the passage of the Clinton tax increases in 1993, but the rationale for those increases had more to do with deficit reduction than with increased government activism. The context for today’s debate over government was decisively established by George W. Bush’s massive tax cuts in 2001 and 2003—a major victory for “beast starving.”

Ultimately, the success of the Stockman doctrine had a secondary effect that grew into a primary one. As a financially strapped government was forced to do less and less to meet the demand for improved services that Stockman acknowledged, public dissatisfaction with government’s performance increased. The conservatives’ effort to defund the public sector paid them a bonus. When voters encountered public policies that fell short of meeting society’s needs and desires, they were likelier to blame the victim—our capacity to govern ourselves fairly—than to hold accountable those who caused the problem. My hope to break this vicious cycle would guide my future political efforts, and my prescription for doing so constitutes the final part of this book.

I believe I was one of the first liberals to understand that the right valued tax cuts not just as ends in themselves but also as bulwarks against policies it objected to on philosophical grounds. Indeed, I received credit for this recognition from two of the strategy’s staunchest journalistic advocates, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Even so, I did not initially appreciate how effective the strategy would be. In the rosy glow of defeating Heckler and observing large Democratic gains in the 1982 midterms, I believed—mistakenly, it turned out—that voters faced with the possible loss of programs to which they were attached would reject the starving-the-beast ploy.

*

As a second-term member, I was not a major participant in formulating the Democrats’ overall strategy. But I was better placed to advance my agenda. In 1983, I became the chairman of a Government Operations subcommittee that covered housing and labor issues. I was able to change its official name from Manpower and Housing to Employment and Housing. While some of my conservative colleagues derided this as a silly example of political correctness, when the Republicans took over the House in 1995, their semantic gymnastics outdid us by a large margin. The Committee on Labor became the Committee on the Workforce. The Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights became the Subcommittee on the Constitution, and “environment” disappeared from the name of the committee that dealt with that subject. From their ideological perspective, they were right to do so. Words not only reflect political preferences, they also reinforce them. And the right has done a much better job of labeling policies to their political advantage. They can vote for every possible war that comes along and still be “pro-life,” while a levy that applies only to the vast fortunes left by the richest 1 percent of Americans when a spousal exemption is claimed is the “death tax.”

My major concern was to avert an imminent danger to low-income people: the disappearance of affordable rental housing. In the 1960s, the government had given developers subsidized loans on the conditon that they charge affordable rents. Unfortunately, that restriction expired after forty years, and in some cases, developers had the option to prepay their loans and raise rents after twenty years. By the early 1980s, the prospect of eviction loomed over tens of thousands of renters, with hundreds of thousands more at risk over the next two decades.

I didn’t know why the drafters had included the time limit; it’s possible they already foresaw the widespread gentrification that would come to many cities. In Boston, much of the subsidized housing was built in the racially mixed South End. A relatively poor neighborhood in the 1960s, it was rapidly becoming a very desirable place to live by the ’80s. Once the rent limits expired, property owners could market their units to gentrifiers who were willing and able to pay much more than the poor to live so close to Boston’s core.

We could not revoke the property owners’ right to raise rents, but we could pay them to sign new agreements that extended the arrangement. Buying out their right to evict poorer tenants was clearly less costly than building new units from scratch. This proved to be a successful approach.

But it was not enough. Given the impossibiltiy of preserving all of the affordable units, and the growing need for decent homes, we also had to construct new ones. Fortunately, there was one form of government activism that conservatives could accept: tax incentives. A coalition of housing advocates and builders devised the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program and sought its inclusion in the ambitious rewrite of the tax code that leaders of both parties had undertaken. I supported their efforts strongly, along with my colleague Charlie Rangel of the tax-writing committee. By lowering tax rates and eliminating loopholes, the 1986 Tax Reform Act was hailed for its bipartisan deal making.

Even so, when the tax reform bill came to the floor of the House the first time, I voted against it because I thought it lowered top income tax rates by too much. Although it passed without my vote, Committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski wanted the bill to be adopted by a large majority, with strong liberal support. When I was told that the chairman wanted my vote, I traded. I promised Rostenkowski I’d support the bill if the tax credit for affordable housing was beefed up. It was. I cite this as an example of how liberals can bargain effectively for better outcomes—despite the criticism of those on the left who disapprove of such tactics. William Greider, an astute critic of economic inequality, told me he was disappointed that I’d supported the bill despite its insufficiently progressive tax rates. But I was happy to sacrifice my ideological purity to improve legislation that was going to become law with or without me.

As a civil libertarian, I would make few exceptions to the right to free speech. But I admit I’d be tempted to ban the use of metaphors in the discussion of public policy. Metaphors more often distort discussion than improve it. For example, countries are not dominoes; they do not lurch into their neighbors and knock them over if their regime changes. The Reaganite claim that a “rising tide lifts all boats” was also very harmful. People are not boats, and increases in GDP are not a tide that rises uniformly. To fight the metaphor on its own simplistic terms, if you are too poor to afford a boat and are standing on tiptoes in the water, the rising tide can go up your nose. Or in real terms, the fact that some—even most—people become wealthier may have adverse consequences on those who do not share in the prosperity. In the case of housing, the economic advances that made downtowns more desirable places to live threatened to submerge the existing residents, not float them. It took the government to ensure that good news in the private sector—sharply improved property values—did not become very bad news for low-income people who would have been driven out of their homes.

*

Shortly after I reached Washington, Congress began coping with the greatest public health crisis of our time: the AIDS epidemic. From the start of the crisis in 1981, there was a great deal of fear that the identification of AIDS with gay men would cause a popular backlash. For the most part, it did not. Some of this was a matter of visibility. The need to confront AIDS led many gay men and women to decide it was time to leave the closet. (AIDS victims, of course, rarely had a choice—Rock Hudson’s sexuality became public knowledge only when he was dying.)

In addition, gays and lesbians won admiration for their response to the illness. There are few comparable examples of private citizens mobilizing to meet the needs of the sick and suffering. In a fairly short period of time, AIDS support groups and action committees provided medical, financial, and emotional support. Even that sector of the population least likely to contract AIDS—lesbians—became deeply involved. The sight of so many people acting selflessly—an impression enhanced by the false belief that AIDS was contagious—burnished the gay community’s reputation. Admiral James Watkins, the career military man who headed President Reagan’s AIDS commission, acknowledged as much in the commission’s final report. It praised “the spark of human spirit which rises high when faced with the gravest of human tragedies” and made clear references to LGBT-dominated groups: “hospice volunteers,” “community-based organizations,” and “other humanitarian groups.”

There were two aspects to the fight in Congress over funding for AIDS research and treatment. Most important was the general level of funding. It was never sufficient, and with Reagan’s lack of attention to the issue, it was especially inadequate in the early phases of the epidemic. But when the Democrats in Congress began to fight for higher expenditures, they soon encountered another issue. As the need for funding became undeniable to all but the most hardened bigots, the anti-LGBT forces tried to prevent effective action by a different means: offering amendments to the funding legislation that would have rendered the money largely unavailable to those who could make best use of it.

It was in this context that I saw how, under the right circumstances, elected officials would take risks to do what was morally right. Sodomy laws were rarely enforced, and while I believed their symbolic impact was harmful, risk-averse legislators had little interest in acting against a harm they perceived abstractly. But risk-averse does not mean unwilling ever to take risks. And the AIDS epidemic was so clearly a danger, not simply to gay men but also to others in the population, that a significant number of my colleagues acknowledged a moral duty to vote in ways that would be described—or caricatured—by their opponents as “pro-gay.”