Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (50 page)

I had expected that playing defense would be less stressful and take up much less time. I hadn’t anticipated that it would also sometimes be very enjoyable.

It was especially fun to taunt the House Republicans for failing to live up to all their bluster. Jeb Hensarling, leader of the committee’s most conservative faction, had previously sought to abolish Fannie and Freddie outright. When we reconvened in January, I said that I assumed that his legislation would be an early item on the committee’s agenda. During the Dodd-Frank conference committee, the Republicans had said that Hensarling’s GSE proposal was ready to be enacted into law without any further change and had been very disappointed when we did not agree. Since they’d said they believed the issue required immediate attention and already had a piece of legislation ready to become law, I asked them when we could expect the committee to be considering it.

I was to have the pleasure of asking this same question over and over for two years without ever getting an answer. As in the previous years when they’d controlled the chamber, they put on a show that could be called “How to Succeed in Making Political Capital About the GSEs Without Doing Anything at All to Reform Them.”

The Republicans were no more active when it came to the substance of the financial reform bill. The contrast between their repeated votes to repeal health care reform and their acceptance of financial reform was implicit proof that they knew financial reform was popular with the public. Sponsorship of a measure to repeal our entire bill was left to Michele Bachmann—who was, to be blunt, never taken seriously by her Republican colleagues on the committee. Her bill didn’t even receive the pro forma gesture of a public hearing.

The committee did pass several narrower bills that sought to fray our reform at the edges. Those bills typically addressed matters that were unimportant, or were so complex that the public might not realize what was being done. The one that seemed to me most dangerous would have exempted American banks’ overseas derivatives activity from the oversight of regulators. After passing our committee, it was en route to necessary action by the Agriculture Committee when the financial industry inadvertently sabotaged its own wishes. The huge reckless derivatives transactions of JPMorgan’s infamous trader nicknamed the London Whale cost the bank billions. Even the most conservative members understood that letting the foreign subsidiaries of JPMorgan and others go free was poor politics, although they still thought it was excellent economics.

Despite all this, I would soon reverse my decision to delay my retirement. Yes, we were fighting to shape public opinion on the role of government in our society, and I was confident that we would win if we made our case correctly. I also liked the fight. When I was asked after my retirement announcement if the rancorous atmosphere in Congress had driven me out, I replied, “No. I’m good at rancor.”

What I wasn’t good at was trying to influence the leadership of the Massachusetts legislature. For thirty years I had represented a district which, in varying forms, extended from the western border of Boston to southeastern Massachusetts. Ironically, in the 2010 campaign, my opponent and his allies complained that the odd contours of the district were due to a gerrymander on my behalf. To the contrary, the basic contours of the district had been constructed in 1981 with the goal of defeating me. The district defied cartographic neatness, but so did many others.

In 2011, the Massachusetts legislature created a new district that was no less ragged in its outlines or diverse in its demography.

It also persuaded me to retire. There were two problems. First, the district would no longer include the New Bedford area, with its fishing community. I had spent twenty years working closely with the people in that industry, and my ties were deeply personal as well as political. It was inconceivable to me that I could remain in Congress and not continue to be their advocate. But it was also hard to figure out how I would be able to take on the job of representing an entire congressional district while spending significant attention on an important industry wholly outside my own constituency.

That might have been doable if I was losing only greater New Bedford. But I was actually losing half my former district. Since I had already made a firm commitment to retire at seventy-five, that meant I’d be asking 350,000 voters I was not currently representing to let me be their advocate for only two more years. My view of my congressional responsibilities had always included a commitment to effective constituent service. Some of that involves attention to one-off individual problems, but much of it involves working over a period of years with local governments and communities on more complex issues. To be fully candid, I also wasn’t too happy about having to ask 350,000 new people for their votes under any circumstances. Two more years of minority service did not seem worth one full year of campaigning. Far better to spend more time with Jim, do some serious writing, and get paid for giving the speeches I’d been giving for free for decades. In November 2011, I announced that I would not run for reelection in 2012.

Within a few weeks I became very fond of something I could not remember ever having experienced—a life entirely free of career-related worries.

*

At the beginning of 2012, I was asked by one of the president’s top aides if I thought Obama’s reelection chances would be hurt if he came out strongly in favor of same-sex marriage. To the contrary, I said, I thought it would help him. There couldn’t be that many Obama supporters who had no objection to his stances on other LGBT issues but would suddenly turn against him if he supported same-sex marriage. On the other side of the equation, LGBT voters would be enthused by his endorsement.

To my great satisfaction, this was one of those rare occasions where I was both optimistic and completely correct. Obama’s announcement cost him nothing that anyone could see, and raised his LGBT support to peak levels in the 2012 presidential campaign. Election Day was very gratifying. Obama defeated Romney by a healthy margin, and my successor, Joe Kennedy, won my seat with 61 percent of the vote. And for the first time, same-sex marriage was endorsed by the voters—not just in one referendum but also in four states across the country: Washington, Minnesota, Maryland, and Maine.

To my disappointment, but not my surprise, the verdict on a stronger public sector was much less encouraging. Democrats did win the presidency by a solid margin, hold the Senate, and make gains in the House—in fact, Democratic candidates received more votes than Republicans in House races, and would have gained even more seats were it not for the gerrymandering that followed the 2010 census. But our successes owed more to Republican extremism than to explicit public enthusiasm for a bigger government role. The Democrats owed their Senate majority in particular to Republican candidates with a penchant for expressing the most right-wing sentiments in the most off-putting ways. Even in Massachusetts, where I happily worked hard for Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign, the Democrats’ victory was largely attributable to her record as a fierce critic of government-business collusion. She won because voters resented the financial community and its political allies, not because they admired the government. While she was a strong, effective supporter of expanded regulation, she was also the beneficiary of continuing anger over what was actually an example of effective government action: TARP. (She had not objected to its passage, but as head of the program’s oversight panel, she had been one of the sharpest critics of its execution.)

Obama did not join in the government bashing. He defended his health care bill—and, less often, our financial reform bill. But he did not campaign for an expansion of government’s role in general. Nor did he disavow his efforts to reach a “grand bargain” with the Republicans that would further restrain public sector spending. His strongest electoral asset was his opponent. Although not as self-immolating as Republican Senate candidates in Missouri and Indiana, Romney won the nomination by positioning himself farther to the right than electability required. His campaign was further hampered by the unusually explicit cynicism of his high-ranking campaign aide, Eric Fehrnstrom, who won the prize for the worst use of a metaphor in our political history when he characterized Romney’s rebirth as a moderate as an exercise in the use of the Etch A Sketch. (In fairness to Fehrnstrom, Romney’s even more damaging denunciation of 47 percent of the electorate appears to have been his own bizarre contribution to the art of gaining votes.)

By the summer of 2012, it was clear to me that we were winning the election because of voters’ disaffection with the right rather than their agreement with the progovernment stance of the left. I expressed that thought in a bumper sticker I had printed, which said
VOTE DEMOCRATIC. WE’RE NOT PERFECT, BUT THEY’RE NUTS.
It was very much in demand at the Democratic convention and throughout the rest of the campaign. I was proud of the slogan. But I regretted that such an accommodation to the electorate’s sour mood was the best case we liberals could make.

*

Having stepped down from the House, I figured my political career was over at last. In fact, retirement would come with one more wrinkle.

Following Obama’s reelection, it was widely believed that John Kerry would replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, and several liberal Massachusetts legislators urged me to seek Kerry’s Senate seat if it was vacated. At the time, I was so satisfied by my life with Jim and without stress that I rejected those requests out of hand. Not only did I shudder at the thought of running a statewide campaign for the seat, but I also disclaimed any interest in serving as the interim appointed senator for the few months that would precede an election.

But when the Republicans began talking once again about shutting down the government, the prospect of serving as an interim senator became more appealing. It seemed highly possible that the first six months of 2013 would crucially shape taxing and spending for years ahead. I wanted very much to be a part of the tumult. An interim appointment offered the best of both worlds: I could play an important role promoting social fairness without having to worry about reelection. As an ardent reader of nineteenth-century British parliamentary history, I had sometimes thought that it must have been very pleasant to be an influential member of the House of Lords. Here was my chance to experience that pleasure without having to buy a robe or pick a lordly name. (Although that last prospect did have its charms. Discussing American insurance law with the chairman of Lloyd’s of London at the Davos forum, I could not help thinking how surprised my immigrant grandmother would have been to learn that one of the most important business figures in England was Lord Levene.)

I proceeded to pursue the interim appointment in what seemed to me the appropriate way. I told Governor Deval Patrick that I wanted the job, and when asked on
Morning Joe
if I was interested, I said that I was.

I’d made four major career choices in my life: deciding to work for Mayor White and for Congressman Harrington, and deciding to run for the legislature and for Congress. In each case, the choice was prompted by other people’s phone calls and the decision made quickly. This time, the decision was the product of careful deliberation about a job with which I was intimately familiar and that I knew I could perform well. It was also the one decision that backfired. My quest failed, completely and very publicly.

To my surprise, my expressions of interest in the appointment were regarded as highly inappropriate by a number of people, most important the governor himself. While he assured me that he was not unhappy that I had made my wishes public, I got a very different impression from people who claimed to know his true feelings. Apparently he regarded any effort to pressure him on this matter as an infringement on his executive prerogative. Had the position involved service in his administration, I would have agreed. But it did not seem to me that an appointment to the U.S. Senate should be left to any governor to dispose of privately, with no public input.

I was gratified by the large number of people and groups that lobbied the governor on my behalf, although I came to realize that these efforts probably added to his irritation with me. I also came to surmise that while I had thought that the Obama administration might welcome me as a temporary Senate ally, the opposite was probably the case. There was renewed talk at the time of a presidential deal with congressional Republicans that would achieve long-term deficit reduction and include some cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits. My interest in the Senate seat was based in large part on my determination to protect those two programs—the most successful antipoverty efforts in American history—and to press for greater military reductions instead. I also learned later that the president had preferred a member of his staff for the job. Presumably, that figure would have been much more supportive of such a deal.

In the end, the governor appointed one of his top aides, Mo Cowan, as rumors had suggested he would. There were two ways to describe the failure of my Senate bid. I had lost by only one vote. But since that vote was the only one cast, the rejection was unanimous.

I was now a private citizen. My disappointment over the Senate seat was soon wiped away by a burst of exhilaration as I realized that I was no longer flinching when the phone rang. For forty-five years, that ring had regularly signaled the arrival of some new problem I was obliged to deal with.

My public life had been one long trade-off. I’d worked as effectively as I could on those matters I needed to address in order to stay in office, and on those that became my responsibility because of my committee positions. The better I was at these tasks, the more influence I had in advocating the changes I believed could make the world a better place—the reason I had entered political life in the first place.

As a private citizen, I was now free to concentrate entirely on advancing those latter causes. I was grateful to my constituents, and respectful of my colleagues, but the freedom to ignore those things that were important to them but of no direct interest to me was a great joy.