In an unabashed celebration of political partisanship, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) spoke Tuesday evening to a packed room in St. Mary’s Hall to kick off the 2003-04 season of the Georgetown College Democrats. For roughly forty minutes, Frank reflected on his own political experience and defended the idea of political parties and the philosophy of the Democratic Party itself.
The openly gay Frank is a prominent and outspoken member of the Democratic Party. For members of the campus democrats, his speach on campus was a chance to galvanize the group’s participants. Parag Chokshi, the speakers and debates director for the group said Congressman Frank was the perfect speaker for the event “He’s very frank,” he said. “He doesn’t beat around the bush.”
The cornerstone of Frank’s speech was his defense of political parties. “One of the most undervalued terms today is partisan,” Frank said. “There has never, in the history of the world, been a successful democracy without political parties.”
In a theme echoed several times throughout the speech, Frank said that in today’s political climate, it makes perfect sense to join with one of the two parties. “The difference between the Republicans and Democrats today is the greatest since the Civil War,” he said.
Frank moved on to defend his party’s principles and to attack those of the Bush administration. The main difference between the two parties today, he said, is that Democrats believe more can be done to reduce inequality than Republicans.
He defended personal freedoms, saying that morality cannot be created by legislation, and attacked the Bush administration’s tax cuts and reduction of social services.
“The notion that you should have two wars and three tax cuts is unprecedented,” he declared, to vigorous applause from the audience.
Audience members appreciated Frank’s views on independents and congressional politics. “These so-called independents who go back and forth, in fact they are all airheads,” he continued, “who could still be undecided between Bush and Gore in October 2000?”
Reflecting on his own experiences, he later declared that members of congress are always very sensitive to the opinions of their constituencies, and never vote solely on the basis of principles. This struck a chord in freshman John McLaughlin (CAS ‘07) who remarked that Frank was “the first honest politician I’ve heard in a while.”
