If you only have time for three paragraphs of Jeff Toobin's massive 8,530-word profile of Barney Frank in the current issue of The New Yorker, let them be these:
Frank’s mordant view of human nature presents a contrast to the sunnier approach of President-elect Obama, a difference reflected in their dispute over Obama’s choice to have Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor, give the invocation at the Inauguration. “Obama tends to overstate his ability to get people to change their opinions and underestimates the importance of confronting ideological differences,” Frank told me. “It’s one thing to talk to somebody. I talk to more conservatives than anyone, because I’m trying to get legislation passed. But it’s another to make Rick Warren the most honored clergyman in the world.” In California, Warren supported Proposition 8, the successful anti-gay-marriage referendum. “Now, when we fight Warren in California, we are going to hear, ‘Oh, yeah, but Obama picked him for the inaugural.’ He doesn’t deserve that honor. And I don’t want to hear that the other clergyman at the inaugural, Reverend [Joseph] Lowery, supports gay rights. I didn’t vote for a tie in the election.”
Frank worries that Obama’s evenhandedness may prove to be a political liability. “On the financial crisis, Obama said that both sides were asleep at the switch,” Frank said. “But that’s not true. The Republicans were wide awake, and they made choices to oppose regulation. They had bad ideas. He says, ‘I don’t want to fight the fights of the nineties,’ but I don’t see any alternative to refighting the fights of the nineties if we want to change things.”
Still, Frank is uncharacteristically hopeful about the future, including gay rights. “We’re going to do three things in Congress,” he told me. “First, a hate-crimes bill—that shouldn’t be too hard. Next, employment discrimination. We almost got that through before, but now we can win even if we add transgender protections, which we are going to do. And finally, after the troops get home from Iraq, gays in the military. The time has come.”
Unfortunately, not everyone at the magazine is as sharp on the Warren debacle as Frank is. The usually sure-footed Rick Hertzberg stumbles with some very fuzzy thinking as he approves of Obama's choice and then dismisses the readers who disagree. In 1967 was he telling interracial couples to calm down about anti-miscegenation laws because, "Marriage is kind of a special case"? If mob rule voters had then reversed Loving v. Virginia, outlawing interracial marriage in thirty states, would Hertzberg only offer wan observations that "all this has about it the feel of a last stand," and "It wasn’t enough this time. But the time is coming." What needs to happen before he thinks gay issues warrant urgency?
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