Read Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage Online
Authors: Barney Frank
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There is a postscript to the fight over Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell that I promised Clinton I’d keep secret. But I now feel free to reveal it because Clinton himself brought it up in a conversation with Taylor Branch that would be published with Clinton’s consent in Branch’s book
The Clinton Tapes.
Branch, whose work on Martin Luther King, Jr., is brilliant journalism that I wish every activist would read, is a strong admirer of Sam Nunn and apparently asked Clinton why he had not appointed Nunn to a major national security post in his second term. Nunn had in fact hoped to become secretary of state. Clinton replied that it was my fault, referring to a memo I had sent him.
I am delighted to plead guilty as charged. After the 1996 election, one of Clinton’s top aides called to warn me that the president was on the verge of making Nunn secretary of state. I started to complain, and the response I got was, “Don’t complain to me. I agree with you, but I haven’t been able to stop it and that’s why I am calling you.” I immediately composed a memo to Clinton in which I said that Nunn had a consistent record of homophobia. As noted, he had fired two men from his staff because they were “security risks” back at a time when the anti-gay order was still in effect. He had vigorously led the fight against allowing us to serve in the military, and in 1996 when Ted Kennedy cleverly forced a vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in the Senate, Nunn was one of only five Democrats to vote against us. In other words, I wrote to Clinton, Nunn has been one of the most effective and dedicated opponents of fair treatment for LGBT people. I have defended you, I went on, against those who have unfairly, in my judgment, accused you of selling us out on the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell issue. But if you appoint this man, who has done so much to harm us, to the most prestigious position you have to give, you will do more to validate those criticisms than I could do to rebut them. I passionately told Clinton that he should not do this to those of us who had been his strongest supporters.
I must acknowledge that I got some personal satisfaction from apparently frustrating Nunn’s aspiration to be secretary of state. But I also thought that something crucial was at stake: Being a leading opponent of fair treatment for LGBT people should be considered a disqualification for high honor within the Democratic Party. No comparable opponent of fair treatment for African Americans, women, or any other group would have been considered for such a post. I am proud that I helped establish the principle that we should receive equal consideration.
In the political climate of the times, I continued to believe that Bill Clinton was the most liberal electable president. And so my mission was clear: I would be his loyal ally where our beliefs converged—while also trying to push him further to the left, especially on economic issues.
While Clinton had criticized certain liberal approaches, I understood that sentiments of that sort were politically necessary. Democrats had lost every presidential race since 1964, except when Jimmy Carter was elected in the aftermath of Watergate, and even then his margin over Jerry Ford dwindled to a very low point as that campaign went on.
More important, Clinton’s first two domestic policy initiatives were strongly consistent with traditional Democratic priorities. His tax proposal was the largest in our history in dollar terms (though not in percentage of the economy), and it reflected liberal values in its composition. It promoted energy efficiency, and it fell most heavily on high-end earners. In fact, after its passage, the Congressional Budget Office noted that for the first time in decades, the tax code had become more progressive. Clinton’s proposal for universal health care similarly embodied a long-held liberal goal, although as with Obama’s plan sixteen years later, it bowed to political reality by using convoluted means to achieve that goal. I was an eager supporter of both efforts. I joined in the strong Democratic lobbying effort that produced a two-vote majority in the House on taxes. Because the health care bill never made it to the floor, and I did not serve on the relevant committees, I was only a cheerleader on the issue, but I was an enthusiastic one.
But while I was encouraged by Clinton’s strong support for raising taxes and extending health care, there were early indications that something in American politics was changing. In healthy capitalist democracies, there are usually two basic political tendencies. Each group recognizes the need for a public sector and a private sector, and political debate concerns where to draw the line between them. In America, it was evident after the 1930s that the Republican Party would resist intrusive regulation and higher taxes while accepting a significant amount of each. Meanwhile, the Democrats would put limits on the market while recognizing the importance of profit making. As the Clinton administration initiated its policies, I operated under the theory that this political balance was still in place.
But it soon became clear that my vision of American politics as a private sector–public sector tug-of-war was losing its validity. The major assault came from the right. Republicans who’d once sought to maintain proper limits on the scope of the public sector now denied that sector’s very moral legitimacy. In 1990, when George H. W. Bush had called for a tax increase, he got more support from Democrats than Republicans. This led to the defeat of his first tax proposal. He was forced to draft a second proposal that hewed closer to Democratic values, and to rely on Democratic votes to pass it.
There was a sharp contrast between that bipartisan accomplishment and the unanimous Republican opposition to any tax increase when Clinton became president. The Republicans were clear that their opposition to Clinton’s plan was not based on its excessive progressivity or its effort to alter the mix of energy use. It was wrong in principle: “It’s not the government’s money,” their mantra went. “It’s the people’s.”
In fact, this makes no sense. In a civilized society that needs a profit-driven private sector and a tax-funded public sector, it is
all
the people’s money. The task facing sensible people is to distinguish between the personal or family needs and wants best fulfilled by individual spending choices and those societal goals that can be achieved only if we pool our resources to buy collective goods.
In fact, the conservatives’ stark dichotomy of “government” and “people” represents the harshest possible judgment on America. It implies that we are not self-governing, that the government, far from being representative of the voters, is a hostile entity that stands apart from the citizenry. When such a claim is made by the official organs of the Iranian or Chinese governments, American conservatives indignantly refute it. But when the same argument is used to block increased public transportation, aid to community colleges, or more money to clean hazardous waste sites, they find it very comforting.
The Republicans’ unanimous opposition to any tax increase in Clinton’s first term—in the face, for example, of Alan Greenspan’s assertion that it was economically necessary—marked the next stage of their effort to starve the beast. By keeping government revenues low, they would force the kind of program cuts they could not win on the merits. In their post-1992 right-wing posture, the GOP was on the way to perfecting a politically potent two-step—delegitimizing the government while defunding it in a mutually reinforcing cycle.
The death of Clinton’s health care plan demonstrated the power of that strategy. I was convinced then and am even more convinced now that political opposition to both the Clinton and Obama health care bills stemmed above all from a lack of public revenue to fund the expansion of care. In both cases, this lack of funds dictated a roundabout method of extending care even though more direct, but publicly costly, alternatives were available. This meant that both proposals were harder to explain than to denounce and, most critically, that large numbers of middle-and working-class citizens were convinced that the expansion of care to those poorer than themselves would come at their expense. Had Clinton been able to put some of the revenue raised by his tax bill into paying for medical care for the uncovered, the plan would have been less complicated and easier to pass. But in an early indication of his determination to avoid being labeled a big-spending liberal, the added revenue all went to deficit reduction—leading James Carville to say that when he died, he wanted to return as the bond market, because everyone in politics was bowing down to its demands.
I did not blame Clinton for these facts—a switch of one vote in either house would have killed the tax bill, and it would surely have lost if it had also addressed health care. But I did differ with Clinton’s response to his health care plan’s demise. As with gays in the military, I did not blame him for our failure, but I was troubled by his willingness to accommodate defeat rather than plan to overturn it.
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On questions of economic policy, my feelings about the administration grew mixed. Throughout Clinton’s first term, I was greatly encouraged by the support HUD secretary Henry Cisneros gave to my highest legislative priority, affordable rental housing. But another domestic issue proved more divisive, engendering an important intraparty debate over how to diminish inequality. That issue was trade.
I’d entered Congress as a believer in the old liberal doctrine of free trade. Franklin Roosevelt had rescued us from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which good liberal economists blamed for aggravating the Great Depression. One of President Kennedy’s few legislative triumphs was a bill renewing his power to reach trade agreements.
By 1983, however, I’d begun to entertain doubts. Candidly, politics played a role in my initial change of heart. When I ran against Margaret Heckler in 1982, the garment and textile workers of Fall River were among my strongest supporters in Heckler’s own backyard. I knew it would be politically damaging to support a trade policy that accelerated the loss of their jobs.
Before long, however, my political reflex turned into a reasoned belief. I joined a bipartisan coalition that sought to restrain garment imports. If my calculations had been entirely political, I would have limited my antitrade position to the garment industry. After all, in the Boston suburbs I represented, the dominant industries—health care, high technology, higher education—were thought to benefit from increased trade. In fact, it was precisely the disparity between Fall River and those suburbs that prompted my conversion. I did not doubt that trade expanded the overall economy, but I was deeply troubled by its negative impact on the distribution of income throughout the country. It was also endangering an important route into the middle class—the automobile industry. I was an early, enthusiastic supporter of domestic content legislation, which required that a certain percentage of automobiles sold in the United States be manufactured here in whole or substantial part. This bill passed the House twice, and although it never progressed in the Senate, it did scare the Japanese into significantly increasing their investment—and employment—in the United States.
In this instance too, my motivation was both ideological and political. Even though I represented no auto workers after the 1982 redistricting, the UAW had offered vital support in my first race when the AFL-CIO did not. By the rules of politics, I owed them. There is nothing wrong with such sentiments. Political effectiveness requires allies, and alliances require the mutual observance of obligations.
By the time Clinton came to office, it was clear that unhindered trade in textiles and automobiles was on the ascent. One of Clinton’s highest priorities was to take the cause even further and pass the North American Free Trade Agreement. I strongly opposed him on this. I joined a coalition demanding that Mexico and Canada establish acceptable minimum standards on workers’ rights and environmental protections. (This demand was obviously aimed at Mexico more than Canada, which exceeded our standards in some areas.) We could not fully protect American workers from low-wage Mexican competition, but we did hope to ensure that manufacturers of Mexican goods would not rely on near slave labor or degrade the air and water.
The administration said they agreed with us in principle and then proposed enforcement measures that would have no serious effect. This was frustrating, to say the least, though it did have its benefits: Clinton’s verbal bow in our direction strengthened our effort to achieve binding rules in the future. Politicians are sometimes less careful than they should be about making concessions that might seem merely rhetorical or cosmetic but that can be used against them later on, when the balance of forces has shifted. I always paid close attention whenever a colleague uttered a remark whose sincerity I doubted and whose future utility I anticipated.
As the free-trade debate proceeded, I saw that the displacement of workers was merely a symptom of fundamental changes in the global economy that were increasing inequality. The failure to make any real progress toward reversing this trend has been the great frustration of my political career.
There was one realm where I could fight effectively, however. In 1993, I became chairman of the Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on International Development, Finance, Trade and Monetary Policy, and I used that position to challenge the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to better serve the people of developing countries. In return for the loans it provided, the IMF often imposed rigid free-market policies. I worried that those policies were economically flawed and had the particularly toxic effect of discrediting democracy in places where we should be encouraging it. Forcing elected governments to impose painful economic reforms only led unhappy citizens to associate democracy with misery.
The World Bank’s problems were somewhat different. Major infrastructure projects—dams, roads, and such—were planned and implemented with too little concern for their impact on the environment and the poor. My experience with highway building in the United States made me immediately receptive to this point. I was also disturbed by the bank’s Doing Business report, which rated all the countries in the world according to their openness to commercial enterprise. It read like an unpublished chapter of Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged.