Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (34 page)

As Hyde had feared, an impeachment based solely on the Lewinsky matter was doomed to fail and cause further difficulty for the Republicans in the House. After the case left our committee and went to the floor of the House, I did not play a major role in that process. My relations with Minority Leader Gephardt had cooled—I’m still not sure why—and I was not included in top-level Democratic strategy sessions. I didn’t mind. The preceding months had been a time of very intense activity on a matter of high national importance, and I was emotionally spent. And unlike the committee proceedings, where we had a chance to shape public opinion, the House debate was tedious. It was conducted under a procedure in which every member received five minutes to talk on a prearranged schedule, with no provision for any interaction. Four hundred or so entirely predictable set pieces later, we voted.

In the end, Starr’s eleven charges against Clinton were reduced to four by the Judiciary Committee, and only two of those charges won a majority on the floor of the House. One of them passed only because the vote was held in a lame-duck Congress—the critical margin of support came from members who’d been defeated in November by Democrats who would have voted no. I thought of this years later when Republicans charged that the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by the lame-duck Congress in 2010 was a repudiation of democracy.

As the drama in the House came to an end, I seemed to be the only person who noticed my relative silence. I recalled the day in 1974 that the veteran Massachusetts politician Frank Bellotti had seen me grimacing over a newspaper. “Stop worrying so much,” he told me when I complained about a negative reference, “you are paying a hell of a lot more attention to you than anybody else is.” Indeed, I had no basis at all to quibble about the reaction I was getting to my impeachment work. In 1999, when Clinton addressed a Democratic fund-raising dinner and performed the ritual of mentioning politicians in the audience, he was interrupted by an enthusiastic response to my name. He proceeded to say that there was no one he would rather have on his side in an all-out fight.
Boston
magazine followed this with a cartoon depicting me as a knight in shining armor, wielding my lance to save the damsel in distress (Clinton, not Lewinsky).

As pleasing as this was in purely personal terms, there was a broader significance—homophobia had diminished to the point where an openly gay man could be one of the most effective defenders of a president accused of heterosexual misdeeds. Apparently, even anti-LGBT politicians were able to put aside their feelings in their evaluation of my work. The late senator Robert Byrd had many good qualities, but freedom from prejudice against us was not one of them. He was one of the small minority of Senate Democrats who voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in 1996. He was also held in high esteem as Congress’s staunchest upholder of procedural regularity. I was therefore very happy when one of the best journalists ever to cover Congress, David Rogers, told me about Byrd’s reaction to one of my passionate anti-impeachment speeches—I’d cited my continuing shame over being reprimanded to argue that censuring Clinton would have a real impact. According to Rogers, Byrd had said that I had done an excellent job, although he hastened to add that he did not approve—whether of me in general or of my “lifestyle” wasn’t entirely clear.

On some days, I could even make light of my sexuality in defending the president. At one point, when an exasperated Hyde was trying to sort out competing demands for recognition during a heated debate, he announced that he would soon swing to me. I began my remarks by saying, “Mr. Chairman, I appreciate your swinging my way,” provoking loud tension-breaking laugher, and a mock-indignant cry of “regular order” from him. (That is the parliamentary phrase invoked when norms are transgressed.)

*

The next developments in my life were more strictly personal. Late in 1998, I had begun a new relationship with Sergio Pombo, a Colombian citizen working for an arm of the World Bank. When I told him we would be attending the White House Christmas ball, he was at first taken aback and later impressed with the Clintons’ warm reception. Less happily, in July 1999, after experiencing chest pains, I went to the Capitol physician, who administered a few tests and insisted that I go immediately to Bethesda’s Naval Hospital for what became a successful quintuple bypass. I have had no heart problems since then.

Five days after my bypass, I returned to work. The timing was good. Hyde had agreed to hold a committee hearing on a longtime LGBT goal: adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the hate crimes law. With several recent gory, hate-filled murders prominent in the news, most graphically the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, the issue seemed urgent. My work helped me avoid the depression that men in very late middle age can succumb to after an operation for a life-threatening condition.

The hearing was especially good for my mental health because we so clearly won the debate. The Republicans’ main witness against us testified that he opposed our effort on free speech grounds: He believed no government penalties should ever attach because of the accused’s opinions, no matter how obnoxious. In response, I asked if his objection to penalizing expression in any form applied to banning flag burning every bit as much as to our proposed hate crimes amendment. He was obviously surprised, not having thought of this point, and his honest, if reluctant, answer was that both impinged on free expression. Since the Republican committee members were prominent advocates of banning flag burning, this comment made it harder for them to portray their position as a defense of free speech, unrelated to any anti-LGBT sentiment.

The legislative fate of the hate crimes bill provides an interesting example of how what I like to call legislative razzle-dazzle can allow congressional leaders to eat their cake and have it too. Republican members who sought to appeal to moderate voters felt the need—and, to be fair, in most cases, the desire—to support us. But the Republican leadership would have faced considerable grief from the right if they’d allowed our bill to actually become law. So they devised a clever stratagem that reveals something about how Congress really works, or doesn’t.

In the Senate, Democrats had added our hate crimes provision—very nongermanely—to the annual authorization of Defense Department activities, and it had passed. In the House, Republican leaders blocked a vote on a freestanding hate crimes bill, then objected to the measure’s inclusion in a defense bill to which it was not related. Our only parliamentary option was a motion to “instruct” the House-Senate conferees to adopt the Senate’s hate crimes provision. But under congressional rules, “instructions” are suggestions—they are not binding. So despite the fact that we carried that motion by a vote of 232 to 192, with 90 percent of Democrats and 19 percent of Republicans supporting us, the Republican leadership of the conference dropped the provision.

The result was a leadership dream: Republican members who wanted a chance to vote yes were satisfied, and so were the much larger number who wanted the bill killed. We were finally able to get the measure passed in 2009, when we had a Democratic president, House, and Senate for the first time since 1994.

*

In 2000, Al Gore and George W. Bush waged their fateful campaign. The battle took on both political and personal significance for me. Its outcome would have a decisive impact on my public policy goals. It also allowed me to complete atoning for one of the bigger mistakes of my career—opposing Michael Dukakis’s reelection in 1978 because I thought him insufficiently liberal.

Ralph Nader’s presence on the ballot alarmed me. He had the potential to win enough left-wing votes to throw the election to Bush. My first move was to send a memo to the top levels of the Gore campaign, proposing that they set up a group to ward off the threat. I suggested that Ron Dellums, Pat Schroeder, and I—an African American, a woman, and a gay man—become core members. The campaign’s first reaction was not to have one. My memo was ignored—possibly because in the intensely turf-conscious political world, it was seen as my bid to gain personal influence, and probably because they did not realize at first how much of a threat Nader represented.

My fervor in this effort was stoked by more than my fears of a Bush victory. Throughout my career, I’d been troubled by my allies’ tendency to choose emotional gratification over tangible, albeit insufficient, progress. The fact that Nader appeared eager to help the right regain the presidency because he found the Democrats imperfect perfectly illustrated what was wrong with this approach.

I had worked with Nader on several issues during my time in Congress, and I admired much of what he had done. But I also regretted the extreme negativism with which he approached almost any political situation. I believed that like many self-styled tough negotiators, he’d adopted the flawed understanding of game theory I described earlier. This was the view that you should never let the other side think you’re satisfied; you should always be asking for more; and you best maximize your gains in fact by minimizing them in characterization, until and unless you are 100 percent successful.

Those who behave this way run two risks. When you tell your supporters that nothing has gotten better, and that any concessions you’ve received are mere tokenism, you take away their incentive to stay mobilized. As for those you’re negotiating with, if you denigrate anything they concede as worthless, they will soon realize they can obtain the same response by giving nothing at all.

In the 2000 campaign, I made my case against Nader’s candidacy as strongly as I could. I believe I got under his skin. When I cited his claim that there were no differences between Gore and Bush on the issues, he responded with indignation: What he had actually said, he angrily noted, was that “there were no significant differences.”

On LGBT rights, of course, Bush and Gore had diametrically opposed views. Since not even Nader could deny that these differences were significant, I further argued, he must consider the issues themselves to be trivial. Nader not only confirmed this, but also doubled down, sneeringly explaining that he’d ignored abortion and LGBT rights because he did not choose to get involved in what he’d called “gonadal politics.” With those words, he added the insult of ridicule to the injury of urging voters to disregard our concerns.

The Gore people did become worried about the Nader effect by the late summer. I was given a speaking slot at the Democratic convention and used it to make my anti-Nader point. But while our effort did help drive Nader’s support down, it wasn’t enough. After the election, I was surprised to hear Nader complain that he was being unfairly blamed for Bush’s victory. This was puzzling, since he had previously argued that it would make no difference who won. A more intellectually honest response would have been: “Yeah, I did it. So what?”

Of course, assigning Nader his share of blame does not absolve everyone else who was responsible for the least democratically valid presidential election since the Hayes-Tilden race of 1876. These include the designers of the Florida ballot, whose work gave us the unlikeliest political alliance in our history: thousands of Jews opting for Pat Buchanan on the confusing butterfly ballot; the Republican mob that intimidated election workers into ending a recount; statewide Florida election officials; and a Republican Supreme Court issuing a partisan opinion tailored to apply to only one election.

While I worked hard to counter Nader’s appeal from the left, I was also concerned about one appeal from the right—the wholly baseless assertion of the gay GOPers who called themselves Log Cabin Republicans that they could make a substantial contribution to our cause by persuading more LGBT people to vote Republican.

The Log Cabineers’ pitch was based on two equally invalid grounds. First, they pointed out that Clinton had signed DADT and DOMA. In making this argument, they were trying to ignore the elephants in the room—specifically the hundreds of Republicans in both the House and Senate who took the lead on both of these anti-LGBT laws, holding the Family and Medical Leave bill hostage to make Clinton agree to the first, and manufacturing an issue just before the 1996 election to get him to sign the second. By then, there was no issue in Americans politics where the party divide in Congress was greater.

The Log Cabin Republicans’ second argument was an appeal to the ideal of bipartisanship. Wouldn’t it be better, they reasonably asked, if there were strong supporters of LGBT equality in both parties? Some of them went on to accuse me of not wanting to see such support.

My answer, which they persistently pretended I hadn’t given, was that I would very much welcome it and I was pleased that they were working to provide it, but that I objected strenuously to their penchant for make-believe. In asking LGBT voters to support Republicans who were antiequality in the hope that someday they might change their views, they were succumbing to fantasy. I added that in any election where the Republican was better than the Democrat on our issue, those most concerned with LGBT advancement should vote for the Republican. At the congressional level, in all my service, I found exactly one such case—in Fairfield County, Connecticut, after Stu McKinney died in 1987, and I urged people to vote for the pro-LGBT Republican who succeeded him, Chris Shays.

Year after year, the Log Cabineers continued to support a party that was hostile to us. In 1996, they remained loyal to Dole—the man most responsible for DADT and DOMA—even after his campaign showed its disrespect by refusing their contributions. As their efforts yielded no gains, I became increasingly angry at their attempts to persuade LGBT voters to support our enemies. Of course, I understand why they were so indignant when I explained their choice of name by saying that their role model was Uncle Tom.

*

The election of George W. Bush was a disaster for a vigorous public sector, but it was not as harmful as it might have been for LGBT rights. The trend lines of these two concerns were beginning to cross on the graph of public approval.