Barney Frank has had enough. A Massachusetts congressman since 1981, Frank said he had been planning to run for one more term next year but decided to retire after Gov. Deval Patrick last week signed into law a reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map that left him representing a district where half the voters are new.
Standing in front of a lone microphone surrounded by a horde of media at Newton City Hall, Frank said he thought he could have won reelection next year. But he said it wouldn’t have been easy, and he couldn’t justify juggling a campaign in a new district while trying to represent his current constituents and fighting in Congress for financial reform and cuts in military spending. He noted his new district will no longer include many of the groups he has long represented, including South Coast fishermen, Azorean-Americans, and people of Cape Verdean ancestry.
“This decision was precipitated by congressional redistricting, not entirely caused by it,” said the 71-year-old Frank. “I’ve been ambivalent about running, not because I don’t continue to think the job is important but because there are other things I’d like to do in my life before my career is over.”
Frank said he wants to become a writer, lecturer, or teacher, professions that in many ways may suit him better than politics. Frank is openly gay and doesn’t look the part of the typical Washington pol dressed in a blue suit and red power tie. At his press conference he was wearing a tweed sport coat, green corduroy pants, scuffed black shoes, a New Bedford fishing tie, and a belt pulled to the right side of his protruding middle.
He’s also not known for holding his tongue, and indicated his decision not to seek reelection will free him from whatever political restraint he had been exercising. “I don’t ever have to pretend to be nice to people I don’t like anymore,” he said with a smile.
Frank said his biggest regret while serving in Congress was having voted against the first intervention in Iraq, which he said was successful because it was limited in scope. He called the Republican refusal to confirm the appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick (a Newton resident) as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “one of the greatest muggings in American history.”
He said the United States is over-committed abroad (he criticized President Obama’s decision last week to station 2,500 Marines in Australia) and vowed to push for the military spending cuts mandated by the budget accord.
On the Republican primary race for president, he marveled at Mitt Romney’s propensity for flip-flopping and said he never thought he’d live to see the day Newt Gingrich would be a leading contender for the nomination. Indeed, he traced much of the current hostility in Washington to Gingrich’s decision to demonize the Democratic Party in the 1990s, which he said engendered an in-kind response from the Democrats and a ratcheting up of hostilities ever since.
But Frank also blamed voters for the endless partisan bickering in Washington. “The electorate has got to stop rewarding excessive militancy,” he said. “The public cannot be totally absolved. They picked us.”
