Posted on 12/02/2011 7:47:08 AM PST by IbJensen
Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank announced on Monday that he will not seek a 17th term in office. Sixteen other House Democrats have announced their retirements, along with six Republicans (who are all seeking higher office). The mass exodus of Democrats leaves political observers wondering if 2012 will be a bad year for President Obama’s party. But Frank, a liberal icon, blames Massachusetts redistricting rather than any national trend for hastening his departure. “I would have had to work very hard,” explained the congressman, who mustered just 54 percent of the 2010 vote. “I think I would have won, but I do know this—it would have been a tough campaign.” » If you like this article, please subscribe to our daily newsletter
Barney_FrankMassachusetts’s new congressional map subtracted more than 300,000 constituents from Frank’s district. Boston’s leafy liberal suburbs—Wellesley, Newton, and Sherborn—remain. Gone is working-class New Bedford, where fishermen benefited from the congressman’s clout. Worse, Frank’s district added some of Republican senator Scott Brown’s electoral strongholds. Seeing the redrawn map, Frank reportedly lamented, “They didn’t do me any favors.”
Maybe not this time around. But Frank owes his long career in no small part to the geographic contortions of his political parcel, which borders Boston and Rhode Island. It so closely resembles a salamander that one would be tempted to term the meandering district a “Barneymander” if early-nineteenth-century governor Elbridge Gerry hadn’t already lent his name to the practice. The politically contrived district explains how the acerbic and scandal-plagued legislator could last so long in public office. Sycophant constituents are rocket fuel to elected narcissists. Massachusetts’s Fourth District let Barney be Barney.
Before the people of Massachusetts’s 4th District selected Barney Frank, God did. Pope John Paul II’s 1980 edict that priests withdraw from electoral politics ended Father Robert Drinan’s tenure in Washington and gave rise to Frank’s. “God’s ways are not our ways,” the clergyman representative reassured dejected followers.
In 1989, Frank’s political obituary seemed all but written when his hustler boyfriend, Stephen Gobie, revealed that he had used the congressman’s townhouse to host clients. The House voted 408–18 to reprimand Frank for fixing 33 of his escort-turned-assistant’s parking tickets and sending misleading letters on congressional stationery to Gobie’s probation officers. A defiant Frank confessed that his biggest mistake was envisioning Gobie as an Eliza Doolittle requiring rehabilitation by his Henry Higgins.
Rather than humbling Frank, the scandal emboldened him. Frank again exploited his office to benefit a paramour—this time with adverse policy rather than tabloid repercussions. As Gretchen Morgensen and Joshua Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment revealed earlier this year, Frank encouraged Fannie Mae in the early 1990s to hire his companion Herb Moses. Fannie Mae generously supported Frank’s family foundation, his political campaigns, and his partner. In turn, the congressman charged with overseeing the housing behemoth became its biggest booster. He spent the last decade assessing Fannie as “fundamentally sound” and dismissing solvency concerns as “artificial.” He tenaciously pressed for “affordable” housing, which the foreclosure crisis revealed as quite unaffordable. “It is a common thing in Washington for members of Congress to have spouses work for the federal government,” he told the Boston Herald, whose “complete political irrelevance” he had celebrated on election night 2010. “There is no rule against it at all.”
Frank was present at the 2007 Maine drug bust of his current boyfriend, James Ready. But like the Herb Moses controversy, the story didn’t get out for several years. Explaining that he was “not a great outdoorsman,” Frank claimed that he “would not recognize most plants,” including the marijuana ones in Ready’s home—coincidentally, a plant that the lawmaker had long sought to decriminalize.
Frank’s serial excuses over the years are of the sort only a true believer could believe. And since Frank served one of the most liberal districts in the United States, true believers went right on believing. Here was a case where a congressman was truly a “representative.”
A mile-a-minute mumbler and go-for-the-jugular debater, Frank insists that he will remain in the political fight. His repeated digs at Newt Gingrich suggest as much. Frank notes, “One of the advantages, to me, of not running for office is I don’t even have to pretend to be nice to people I don’t like.” Some of us never noticed he was trying.
Daniel J. Flynn, author of Blue Collar Intellectuals and other books, blogs at flynnfiles.com.
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Not to worry. There is a more than ample supply of scum on that pond to take up the slack. So much so, in fact, that Barney’s absence will go unnoticed.
Work! Work hard! Guess that is a new concept for these Congress Critters. Not to worry Barney. You can always collect unemployment insurance for 99 weeks.
Has Dick Armey said goodbye to Barney in his inimical way?
Sounds like he was told to leave.
Can not say that I am going to miss “My Boy Lolipop”!
I absolutely cannot believe this.
Barney Frank said that he’s leaving Congress because it would have been a tough campaign????
Can I make an observation, that these guys serve because they are elected by the people, and elections are supposed to be tough campaigns between opposing candidates and opposing parties. Nobody is entitled to easy re-election. Or does Barney think he is special?
Does Barney think that somehow he was entitled to a safe district to run in?
So now Barney is going to take his ball and go home?
He sounds like a real quitter and lame individual. If he is so convinced that Democrat values and his brand of liberalism are so superior, he would not hestitate to run for re-election and tell us all about it.
Hopefully a more honorable guy like Sean Bielat will represent the 4th.
I hear he’s going to be the newest member of The View. I guess they needed a feminine touch to balance Whoopie Goldberg.
Yep. Although he probably knew without New Bedford, he'd be toast.
But Frank, a liberal icon...
...more like a “progressive” POS
http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=71§iontree=2,71
DEPOPULATE socialists/totalitarians from the body politic. Live free and prosper.
Unfortunately he isn’t likely to go anywhere but into the shadows with the other 350+ former congressmen who are currently lobbyists and advisors.
Barney Frank has accomplished all that heshalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
has been called on to do by haSatan.He has normalized Sodom and Gomorrah.
He with Chris Dodd and Nancy Pelosi
have destroyed our free market
system and plunged this country
into a slide into a third world nation.0bama is now leading us into a
totalitarian state through Obama-Care.The Marxist party will destroy all
conservative candidates and will only
allow RINOS who will lose again.
Unfortunately, the retirement was NOT immediate. Bawney will still have the opportunity to work his mischief until January, 2013.
Ridicule did not seem to work on Bawney, else he would have fled in shame long ago. The poster child for chicanery and hypocrisy, he seems not able to accept that ANYBODY questions his role in the collapse of the Freddie Mac-Fannie Mae government supported enterprises, or the very toxic effects of the Dodds-Frank bill that places severe penalties on business for failing to practice the shabby and unrealistic accounting that is called under its provisions.
Bawney cannot be gone soon enough.
Adios Barney fag.
Let’s face it, Barney’s not a good looking man. He has to buy his bootie.
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