A Frank Farewell

When Barney Frank announced on November 21 that he would not seek re-election, I was disappointed. I am not a Frank fanatic; his ideals and methods are not exactly my own, and I believe that sometimes he can be overly pugnacious. However, there will be a void left in the political stratosphere because there are few politicians these days that devote their time and their intellect into actually studying issues before entering into a debate, as opposed to being briefed on them by staffers beforehand.

There are many accomplishments in Frank’s lifetime that are noteworthy. He rose out of notoriously corrupt Hudson County NJ, where his father ran a truck stop, to attend Harvard. In 1987, he broke ground by publicly disclosing that he was gay, becoming the first congressman to voluntarily offer up that information. What delineates Barney Frank however, is his dedication to understanding the intricacies of the issues that he is involved in; he pores over data like a sage. There are too many people walking the planet today that eagerly enter into disputes without a firm grasp of the complexities involved. Simply being briefed on a topic works to one’s detriment; someone who has put in the time to keep themselves well-versed on the argument at hand will eat them for lunch in a debate. It happens every day on political talk shows and I see nothing change.

Of course, not every politician—nor individual for that matter—has the time to become an expert on every topic that they are involved in but there is a way to avoid publicly showcasing this; simply do not enter into a debate if you do not have a firm enough understanding to defend your point of view. When this happened on issues Frank was involved in, he would step in and verbally disarm them. If nothing more, that was fun to watch and I will miss it.

I’m not sure that everyone in the industry will miss Frank. Dodd-Frank legislation, the stone thrown into the industry’s pond, is still causing circles to ripple and there are plenty of people who would like to see them not reach the water’s edge. He served as a lightning rod for conservatives across the country. Frank was a boogie man coming down from the hills of Massachusetts to terrorize them by gracefully and dismembering their ideals and values with a keen sense of wit and a more-than-slightly sarcastic smile.

Frank was no saint and I am certainly not seeking to beatify him here, but in the sense that he is a politician’s politician, he may very well be canonized one day in the halls of Congress for his tenaciousness in the face of scandals. The 1989 scandal involving Steve Gobie, a male prostitute and convicted drug user that Frank hired to become a housekeeper and driver thrust him into an uncomfortable spotlight but it did not stop him from working.