Volume 42, Number 5 · March 23, 1995
The Visionary
By Garry Wills
That is Barney Frank speaking, the Massachusetts representative who has become the Democrats' rhetorical standard-bearer in this time of defeat and confusion for his party.[1] Moderate Republicans are afraid to break ranks. When Carrie Meek, the black representative from Florida, criticized Gingrich's four-and-a-half-million dollar contract with a publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Republicans not only shut her up but struck her words from the record. Frank said they would never have treated the black former domestic this way in the past. After all, he says, 'She looks like she just came from nursing Miss Scarlett,' though she is a shrewd user of that image. 'Peter Torkildsen [Republican from Massachusetts] was quoted the next day in the Boston Globe saying, 'I don't think her remarks should have been stricken from the record'—but he voted that way.'
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