CHAMPION AGAINST INEQUALITY - Barney Frank

"How Barney Frank used government to fight inequality" PBS NewsHour 4/23/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  For more than half a century, Barney Frank was one of America's loudest voices for progressive policies, both financial and social.  Economics correspondent Paul Solman spends a day in Boston with the famous former lawmaker and financial reformer to discuss his new memoir, “Frank:  A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage.”

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  Next, a profile of a crusading voice on financial reform who also became a public figure in the debate over gay rights.

It’s the story of former Congressman Barney Frank, son of a mob-connected New Jersey father.  He went on to Harvard and to volunteer as a Freedom Rider in Mississippi.  His public and private story, including his long tenure as a lawmaker, is the subject of his new autobiography.

Economics correspondent Paul Solman caught up with him in Boston for tonight’s installment of Making Sense, which airs every Thursday on the NewsHour.

PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour):  For 32 years, perhaps the country’s most controversial, quick-witted congressman, Barney Frank, now improbably lolling in semi-retirement.

But for almost half-a-century, his was one of the America’s loudest voices for progressive policies, both economic and social, a devotee of using government to help redress inequality.

His new autobiography sums up his half-a-century of effort, and the two stunning surprises of his long career, the revolution in attitudes toward government and sexuality.

So, you start out, government in high repute, homosexuality…

FORMER REP. BARNEY FRANK (D), Massachusetts:  In low repute.

PAUL SOLMAN:  Contemptible.

BARNEY FRANK:  Yes.

PAUL SOLMAN:  And now it’s the other way around.

BARNEY FRANK:  Well, as I have said, by the time I retired in 2012, my marriage to my husband, Jim, got a much better public response than my chairmanship of the committee that wrote the financial reform bill.

PAUL SOLMAN:  When Frank began his political career here at Boston City Hall, it was unheard of to be openly gay.  So, he remained in the closet, a bright-eyed Harvard-schooled reformist assistant to Boston Mayor Kevin White in 1968.  His government goals?