In 1964, two years after graduating from Harvard, Barney Frank went to Mississippi as a civil rights worker. That August, at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., a group of blacks calling themselves the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party asked to be seated as the state’s official delegation.
Some liberals thought white Mississippians might support the Freedom Party’s bid, but Barney was deeply skeptical. He sent a telegram to his friends in Atlantic City, warning them not to count on that help “until you’ve heard the ayes of their whites.”
We’ve told that story many times because it was Barney at his best: a brilliant political strategist who also happened to be the wittiest guy around. And he turned out to be right. Convention delegates, urged on by President Johnson, rejected the Freedom Party because they were afraid of angering Southern conservatives.
When Barney announced recently that he was leaving Congress after 32 years, the reaction in Washington was extraordinary. The newspaper Politico ran the story across the top of Page One under the headline, “Frank Legacy: ‘One of a Kind.’” And he was certainly the only Jewish, gay, left-handed congressman who spoke with a thick New Jersey accent while representing suburban Boston.
But those labels are only part of his legacy. Even though he was the first gay lawmaker to come out in public, in many ways Barney was more a throwback than a pioneer. When it came to Congress, he was very old-fashioned. He believed in the institution, he believed in compromise, and he believed in the legislative process. That’s why he worked with the Bush administration to pass legislation that saved the financial system in 2008.
Opponents liked to demonize him as a doctrinaire liberal, and while he was certainly an ardent supporter of gay rights, his critics always got him wrong. His sister Ann Lewis, a longtime Democratic strategist, once described the two of them as “the pragmatic caucus of the progressive wing.” The question they always asked was: “How are we going to get it done?”
That sense of pragmatism, of finding a workable solution to a practical problem, is exactly what’s missing in a capital slashed and burned by ideological warfare. And while it’s true that Barney was facing a tough re-election fight, he’s also leaving Congress because the old-time virtues he’s always lived by are no longer valued here.
