Barney Frank's Frankness [Jonah Goldberg]
Barney Frank's confrontation of Chris Wallace is getting the predictable response. I have a mixture of fondness and respect for Frank because I think he's a rare breed: a truly sharp congressman who tries pretty hard to tell the truth as he sees it. But I thought his slap at Chris Wallace was pretty silly. It's hardly shocking that a Sunday show interviewer would look for "controversy." And that's hardly a staple of supposedly conservative media (in the next segment Wallace queried Trent Lott about his infamous Thurmond comments — which were even more irrelevant to the GOP's forthcoming agenda).
But what I did find amusing and interesting was Frank's repeated formulation that the controversial issues weren't at the top of the Democrats' agenda. For example:
WALLACE: Congressman Frank, you said recently that you would like to repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military. Isn't that exactly the kind of inflammatory fight the Democrats want to avoid at this point?
FRANK: Well, it's not something that would happen at first. But no, I don't think it's inflammatory to say that the young men and women ought to be able to join the military. I think, Chris, that you're looking to pick fights where there aren't. As I said, our first efforts are going to be to do those things that I think the mainstream of America wants [....]
[....]But that's not what we're going to begin with. And people listening to you might get the wrong idea. We're going to begin with making it easier for middle class and working class people to go to college. These are, again, things that we — they have become liberal because the right wing has in its extremism abandoned them, and those are the things we plan to begin first.
Now, Frank's a real leftwinger, a darling of the base, and undoubtedly will hold his seat for the rest of his life if he wants, so he has a certain liberty to be more forthright than others. But I think it's telling that Frank's position re the left's priorities is not that they aren't on the agenda, they're just not at the top of the agenda because, as his colleague Charlie Rangel put it, "What we want to do is to prove that we can govern for the next two years." After that, the left's action items will make their way to the top of the list. I don't think there's anything wrong with this insofar as that's pretty much what a principled but realistic ideologue should say and do. But it does demonstrate in a small way how the recent Democratic victory was hardly a triumph for a new centrist form of politics. The centrism is tactical, not principled — at least when it comes to the new barons of the House. |
