Rum, Romanism and Barney Frank

Politicians in trouble are a little like people suffering from terminal illness: They head for home hoping for a miraculous cure or at least for the comfort of dying among friends. This behavior is particularly noticeable among members of the House of Representatives, whose one-time Speaker, Tip O’Neill, advised newcomers that “all politics is local.” He meant that House members lived or died politically by local issues, not national trends.

Increasingly, however, the conduct of individual members of Congress ceases to be a strictly local issue and begins to raise questions beyond the narrow confines of a single congressional district.

One official whose problems are not a matter of mere parochial importance is Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts’ 4th Congressional District. Frank, an acknowledged homosexual, has admitted that in 1985 he paid to have sex with a male prostitute and then embarked on a two-year relationship with the man. During that period, Frank hired the man for $20,000 in personal funds, as a driver and housekeeper. The man, Steven Gobie, was on parole at the time in Virginia. He had been convicted of sodomy, obscenity and possession of cocaine.

Frank’s explanation for hiring Gobie was that he hoped to rescue Gobie from a life of drugs and degradation. Frank likened himself to Prof. Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” who raised up that forlorn mudsill of society, Eliza Doolittle. Frank was working with an inherently less noble product in Steven Gobie, who began using the congressman’s apartment in Washington to continue his career as a prostitute. After Frank’s landlord called his attention to Gobie’s activities, Frank fired the man, but rehired him several months later when he claimed to be destitute. The final break came after Gobie, whose new duties included taking Frank’s clothing to the cleaners, refused to return some of the garments.

On the surface, this sad and sordid event should be of concern only to the people of the 4th Congressional District. After all, Barney Frank is not Jim Wright. His offenses did not tie in closely with his public responsibilities, and he has stated that letters he wrote to Gobie’s parole officer merely stated that the man was employed by Frank and applied no political pressure. Moreover, Frank himself has asked the House ethics committee to conduct an investigation into the case.

Although Barney Frank’s name is not a household word, the congressman is no dreary back-bencher. He is a leading liberal voice in the House, a persuasive and influential member who draws support beyond the borders of his Boston-area district. His hard-fought victory over Rep. Margaret Heckler in the redistricted 4th in 1982 was a triumph at a time of dark days for Democrats.

But what makes Frank’s problems even more national in their implications is that they add one more bit of evidence that the Democrats are the party of moral turpitude. This is a knock against which they have been fighting since a Republican clergyman in 1884 proclaimed them to be the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.” They were, after all, home to the treasonable Southerners, to Catholics who were widely believed to be getting their voting cues from Rome, and, worst of all, to the drinkers who favored the Democrats’ liberal positions on alcoholic beverages.

Attack by alliteration was revived in the early 1970s when Democrats became the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion.” But it was in the 1988 presidential election that charges against the Democrats for tolerating deviant and anti-social behavior reached a hysterical crescendo.

By tormenting the Democrats so sadistically and skillfully with the positive symbol of the flag and the negative image of Willie Horton, the GOP may have encoded into the nation’s political genes a picture of the Democrats as the party of moral laxity. It is certainly difficult for Democrats to refute the charge that their party has been far more hospitable to groups and movements well outside the mainstream of American culture than have the Republicans. The GOP, indeed, has advanced itself as the guardian of the most conventional social mores, so that when Republican politicians get caught with their pants down, their transgressions can be written off as exceptions to an otherwise sterling norm. Democrats lack that noble franchise in the popular mind.

The strong liberal sentiments that flourish in his district will probably give Frank another term in 1990 unless more damaging evidence arises. It is even conceivable that Frank could be censured and still retain the support of a majority of his constituents as his colleague Gerry Studds did after he was censured for having sex with a young congressional page.

But the affection of voters for their own representatives in Washington is often at odds with what is best for the House, the party or the country.

Without question, Jim Wright would have been returned to Congress by voters in his district had he chosen to seek another term. But sometimes, as his departure demonstrated, the satisfaction of local acclaim is not enough. Barney Frank is too important a figure to take refuge in a parochial defense. There are values even greater than his own valuable incumbency.