Barney Frank, the retired Democratic congressman who represented Massachusetts’ Fourth District from 1981 to 2013 and is now in hospice care, is not wasting a minute of the time he has left.
Mr. Frank, 86, has been hosting a parade of friends and former colleagues at the modest hillside home he shares with his husband, Jim Ready, in Ogunquit, Maine, where lobster buoys dangle from the trees beside the driveway. He is also offering his fellow Democrats some parting thoughts on what he thinks they need to do to win again, a subject he reflects upon at length in a new book due out in September.
A veteran progressive known for his gay rights advocacy, as well as his leading role in tightening financial regulations after the global banking crisis of 2008, Mr. Frank said overreach by the left, with stances that alienate moderates, had set back Democrats. He worries progressives want too much too fast on trans rights, Medicare and other issues, and that they are swooning for the wrong candidates, like Graham Platner in Maine. His overall outlook for the party is hopeful. But if his voice is slightly softer now — he is suffering from congestive heart failure — his delivery is no less blunt.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
What do you see as the biggest problem Democrats need to overcome?
The key to liberal democracy being able to come back is to get rid of the perception, that we have allowed to grow, that the entire Democratic Party is committed to a series of very drastic social reconstructions that go beyond the politically acceptable.
Most of my mainstream Democratic colleagues agree with me, but they have been reluctant to say that because they’re afraid of being attacked in primaries and accused of being secret conservatives. So I want to use my unfortunate situation to say something that I think is very important.
How do you reconcile that concern about political acceptability with your history as an advocate for gay rights, the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as gay, and the first gay congressman to marry while in office?
I am not arguing that people shouldn’t advocate for things that are currently unpopular. I know there are some issues that I support that are currently unpopular. And the first thing to do is to try and increase the degree to which they have public support.
The problem with my friends on the left today is that they want these things to be litmus tests, immediately. They don’t want to spend any time. So what happens is they demand that more mainstream liberals sign on to these things, and then they lose because of it.
So what do you advise for advancing unpopular causes? Are there lessons to be drawn from the gay rights movement?
When we were fighting for gay rights — a fight I think we have essentially won — we knew that some issues were more popular than others. So we tended to start by trying to win the ones that were most popular. Gays in the military. Employment. We didn’t go after same-sex marriage, we didn’t make marriage a litmus test, until the very end.
I analogize that to male-to-female transgender sports. That is the most controversial part of the agenda — the equivalent of gay marriage — so put it at the end. If you go at it that way, you build support for it. But if you insist on the most controversial parts all at once, you make it harder.
What other tough issues could benefit from this approach?
I think it would be a better world, a better America, if somehow everybody had Medicare. But they don’t. And so something that I think would be very helpful, substantively and politically, is to reduce the age of Medicare to 60 from 65. A lot of families would benefit.
You could do it right away, and it would work, and it would build support for going even further. But the left does not support an increase in Medicare coverage. They want to do something more revolutionary.
What happened to shift the left’s approach, from the more incremental progress of the gay rights movement to the moment we’re in now?
What makes people angry is not just bad outcomes, but bad outcomes that they think have been deliberately imposed.
So when the financial crisis comes in 2008, people then become convinced that this inequality that’s been building up is not God’s law — it’s the choice of the establishment to do it. And so the left began to campaign to take inequality into account, and they did surprisingly well.
By the end of the decade, most Democrats were ready to deal with inequality, as Biden was, and they were acknowledging that the left was right. But instead of, sort of, taking yes for an answer, some people on the left, who believed there was a lot more wrong with America than simply economic inequality, said: See? We were right, and we’re not going to stop with economics. We’re going after all these racial and cultural things.
So people who had a more fundamental critique of American society felt emboldened by that success on the economic front.
Here in Maine, what are you thinking about the U.S. Senate race, about Graham Platner?
Well, I was one of the people who urged the governor [Janet Mills] to run. [Ms. Mills dropped out of the race last month.] I didn’t expect to see it go the way it did. It’s interesting, you know, because the governor was a big hero for standing up to Trump. But that just disappeared. And I’m troubled by this embrace of Platner, in the absence of any specifics. I don’t have any explanation for it. It is a measure of how angry people are.
This is a predictable question, but as you look back, what are you proudest of?
I’m very proud of the fact that I’m smart enough not to answer that question.
Given your current situation, is it harder to focus on politics?
I’m thinking less about the fact that I’m going to die soon than I thought I would. My heart is giving out, but I’m not having any pain. And I’m pleasantly surprised at the resonance this message is having. Frankly, if I weren’t dying, people wouldn’t be paying as much attention.
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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