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Chapter 1: What impact did Barney Frank have on America's financial system?
Former Democratic Congressman Barney Frank died on Tuesday. Frank had a huge impact on America's financial system, possibly more than any other politician this century. He was the lead architect of the Dodd-Frank Act, which passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Barney Frank, there's no one like him in Congress that I've ever covered.
Damian Paletta heads the Wall Street Journal's D.C. bureau. He was hilarious. He was mean. He was brilliant. He would kind of slump in his chair.
Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it. I think that I love this job, but the biggest problem is there are thousands of people in Washington who earn a living by trying to waste my time.
One of the advantages to me of not running for office is I don't even have to pretend to try to be nice to people I don't like.
Damien first started writing about Barney Frank about 20 years ago. This was an era when I covered him really from 2006, I'd say, to 2012, an era where a lot of lawmakers were figuring out how to monetize their term in Congress and how to raise tons of money. And he was just the same old Barney, you know, shirt untucked, you know, suit wrinkled.
always hair kind of pushed around, and he was kind of an old-school guy in an era when Congress was changing.
So Barney Frank died this week. And in the pantheon of powerful lawmakers, where does Frank stand?
I think he's an iconic figure. Whether you appreciated him or really reviled him, I mean, he was a force to be reckoned with for his time in Congress. And no matter where he was, what issue he was weighing in on, he had something really kind of thoughtful and poignant to say and provocative often. And so no matter whether you were...
the most conservative member, the most liberal member, you know, Barney Frank always got everyone's attention.
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Chapter 2: How did Barney Frank's early career shape his influence in Congress?
I just didn't pay a lot of attention. to how I dressed and how I looked, especially during campaigns. And I had a tendency to eat a lot when I was stressed. So people would try to get me to keep my hair combed better or dress better, buy more, you know, buy suits before the old one wore out.
In 1987, Frank came out as gay, which was a pioneering move for a politician at the time. He later recalled telling then-House Speaker Tip O'Neill about it before the announcement.
I said I just wanted to alert you that there may be some stuff coming out about my being gay. He said, oh, Barney, don't be listening to that crap. They say all that stuff about all this. I said, well, Tip, the point here is that it's true.
Well, I remember him telling me that Tip O'Neill, at the time, who was the House Speaker, was really trying to mentor Barney Frank to be a future House Speaker. And, you know, when he came out as gay, and there was a scandal, to be sure, that was kind of associated with part of his coming out in this way.
There was a conversation between Tip O'Neill and Barney Frank that acknowledged that Barney Frank would never get to that spot, that he was smart enough to be Speaker one day, but it was because of this scandal that he had and the fact that he was gay that he would never get to that position. And so I think that made him scrappier and, you know, work harder.
And so instead he had to kind of forge a different path. And for him, that path would lead him to be chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, which was an incredibly powerful committee. Where did he get all this finance and banking chops? Where did he learn all this stuff? He's a really smart guy. He would always show up at every committee hearing. He would ask really good questions.
And I think as time went on and the more and more banks and securities firms would come to brief him on their issues, he was learn and learn and learn. And obviously, Boston, there's some major financial institutions in Boston. And they always had access to him.
And so Barney Frank always knew who to reach out to and who to ask information about some of these issues so that when really push came to shove, he knew exactly where to zero in.
So the financial crisis hits, Lehman Brothers collapses. Barney Frank is in this powerful position on the Financial Services Committee in Congress. How did that change the trajectory of his career?
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