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As former Rep. Barney Frank enters hospice, he has some blunt advice for his party
Frank, 86, represented Massachusetts in Congress for 32 years. He is now dealing with congestive heart failure at his home in Maine.
Former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank may be nearing the end of his life, but he is continuing to make his political opinions known.
Frank, who represented Massachusetts in the House for 32 years, recently entered hospice care at his home in Ogunquit, Maine, Politico reported. The octogenarian is reportedly dealing with congestive heart failure.
“After 86 years, my heart’s just wearing out,” Frank recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
The congressman, an outspoken liberal who publicly came out as gay in 1987, is known for helping to advance same-sex marriage rights and for sponsoring the Dodd-Frank Act in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
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He is working on a new book, “The Hard Path to Unity,” which is set to be published in September. According to its publisher, Yale University Press, the book analyzes how liberals in America and elsewhere “lost support to xenophobic populism.” Liberals ignored rising economic inequality while simultaneously failing to distance themselves from “the politically toxic social agenda” of the far left, Frank argues in the book.
“I face a literal deadline, so I don’t know how we’ll adjust to that,” Frank said of the book’s release timing in an interview with Politico.
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Frank told Tapper that he is filled with “disgust” at the current state of U.S. politics under the Trump administration but is optimistic that things can improve, which is why he is writing the new book. The country is now witnessing the “implosion” of President Donald Trump’s political project, Frank said, and a more liberal politics will be able to take its place.
“I think we have the ability, people in the mainstream, to defeat populism of the reactionary sort if we do the right things,” he said on CNN.
Frank spoke about how, as he and his liberal allies worked to advance gay rights, they took a step-by-step approach that slowly built toward marriage equality. Those working to advance rights for transgender people today should pursue change in a “more granular way,” he said.
“As we succeeded in bringing the mainstream of the left into a concern with inequality, we also enabled people who wanted to use that as a platform for a wide range of social and cultural changes, some of which the public isn’t ready for,” he said.
Frank has remained vocal during his retirement, leveling notable criticisms at figures like Mitt Romney and Bernie Sanders. He was asked by Tapper to weigh in on the Maine Senate race, where Gov. Janet Mills recently dropped out and paved the way for progressive insurgent Graham Platner to challenge the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, in the general election.
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Frank supported Mills. He sees a point of similarity between Platner and Trump, in that both are adept at exploiting voters’ discontent. But Frank worries that this could make it hard for Platner to win a general election against Collins, he said.
“I worry a little bit about the tendency on the Democratic side to fall for the flavor of the month,” Frank told Politico when asked about Platner. “There is this flirtation or this attraction of people who are new and who are very good at articulating a response to the anger, but without talking about what you do about it.”
Asked what he would want young people to know, Frank spoke to Tapper about the angst many young LGBTQ+ people feel about the possibility of losing their rights. History shows the “positive capacity of our system,” he said.
“I want younger people, all people, to understand that a political majority can get things done more than people think,” he said on CNN.
Frank was more reserved when asked what he wanted people to remember about him.
“That I was smart enough… not to answer that question,” Frank told Tapper.
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