Barney Frank, in Hospice Care, Shares Political Advice for Democrats in Final Interviews

Barney Frank, a former congressman now in hospice care with congestive heart failure, spoke by phone from his home in Ogunquit, Maine, on Sunday. Though his doctors are not predicting how much time he has left, Frank acknowledged that his impending death is giving him access to more media platforms for spreading his message.

In one such interview, conducted partly for his Boston Globe obituary, Frank focused on advice for Democratic candidates. S. House of Representatives.

Frank believes past approaches he took to advocating for liberal causes can inform current Democratic campaigns. Frank hopes his longtime liberal credentials will bolster his call for a more pragmatic approach in the current political climate. 'In fairness to me, I’ve been saying a lot of this for some time,' Frank said.

He wants to use his reputation of being on the left to legitimize dissent with those on the left. Recalling his time in the 1970s as a lawmaker in the Massachusetts state Legislature, Frank said he advocated for extending legal anti-discrimination protections to gays and lesbians without forcing all his Democratic colleagues to publicly embrace the push, to avoid making them vulnerable in elections.

He also advocated for same-sex marriage before it became legal in Massachusetts and nationwide.

'You have to have two sets of issues: those to which you are deeply committed and are trying to get enacted right away, and those for which you are an advocate of ideas that you know are not yet popular,' Frank said. Frank expressed concern that the left wing of the Democratic Party has turned certain progressive stances into litmus tests that could force more electable mainstream Democrats off ballots or lead to their defeats in primaries.

While praising Democrats’ recognition of economic inequality as a key issue, he said those on the most militant left are going too far, too fast.

'Instead of saying, as I wish they had, ‘See, we were right about inequality, let’s get rid of it,’ they took that as a sign that, frankly, they could be right about everything,' Frank said. He added that many Democrats, faced with potentially alienating progressives, have responded by avoiding criticism to prevent accusations of fighting with the left.

Frank reminded those to his political left that smaller moments of change serve as foundation stones for larger accomplishments, citing his own experience with same-sex marriage advocacy.

'It’s important to understand the difference between advocacy of a position and recognizing its political acceptability,' he said. Because he knows his time is limited, Frank is thinking about his political legacy and how these interviews will shape views of his work. He hopes his advice will help Democrats win the 2028 election by diminishing problems injected by the left.

'The ideal of it is that people will be saying after the ’28 election that my advice helped the Democrats win because it diminished the problems that were injected by the left,' Frank said. Still intellectually restless amid the less active life of hospice care, Frank said he is very comfortable, though he wishes it wasn’t happening.

At the end of the interview, he wondered when it would be published and if he would be around to read it.

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