Barney Frank, Massachusetts congressman for 32 years, dies at 86

Barney Frank, an outspoken Democrat who represented Massachusetts in Congress for 32 years, has died, the Associated Press reported, citing his former campaign manager and close friend. He was 86 years old.

Frank had been in hospice care for congestive heart failure at his home in Ogunquit, Maine.

“People should leave their legacies to other people to describe,” Frank once said.

For those outside his inner circle of family and friends, the public legacy of the late congressman from Newton may be best described by the people he served from 1981 to 2013.

They are the ones who rallied behind Frank when he sought re-election in 1988 after publicly acknowledging his homosexuality, a rarity back then. His constituents affirmed their support in 1990 after a scandal involving his association with a male prostitute, which a House Ethics Committee investigation found included Frank fixing parking tickets and making misleading statements to prosecutors in criminal cases involving the prostitute.

It wasn’t just liberals from Newton and Brookline who backed Frank. In 1988, Frank swept every city and town in the Fourth Congressional District except for resolutely-Republican Dover. In the 1990 race, he ran up huge margins in the more-conservative southern end of his district, winning Fall River by nearly a 4-to-1 margin. In a WBZ-TV poll at the time, 65% said Frank should not resign as the Boston Globe and other prominent voices were urging; another 60% said Frank should run for re-election. And another poll found 56% thought he had “performed well enough as a congressman to deserve reelection.”

As the Taunton Daily Gazette put it in a 2011 appreciation, “he was without question a tenacious fighter for the interests of the South Coast on the state and national levels…. Frank’s knack for constituent services was well known throughout the district, with some folks around these parts boasting about how they had been helped out by Barney – no last name necessary.” 

The Gazette deemed Frank’s Congressional legacy “mixed,” and said he carried “a lot of baggage.” But his tenure graphically demonstrated the willingness of voters to separate a politician’s personal life from his professional performance, a tolerance that, from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump, has become a given in our political culture.

Frank served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee from 2007 to 2011 and he co-sponsored the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the financial reform law passed following the 2008 housing crash. He decided not to seek reelection in 2012, citing signficiant redistricting. 

To echo his own directive, we’ll leave it to others to dissect Barney Frank’s impact on the wide range of political issues he was involved in, and on the political culture in general.

But one key aspect of his public life is beyond dispute – he did his job, and judging from the reaction of his constituents, did it well.