The Boston Globe

This is what it must have been like to be in Jim Wright’s district, or in Tony Coelho’s. The scandal this time is starring Barney Frank, the guy from your own district, the 4th district of Massachusetts.

The story breaks like an accident report, a political sea disaster. Steve Govie, a hooker at the helm, opens up a leak the size of the hole in the Valdez and pours oil, 100 percent crude, over Barney Frank’s reputation.

Frank had hired the prostitute. The prostitute had used Frank’s apartment to ply his trade. The story is a sleazy one as it goes out over the wires. But in the district, you really know the guy. So here you put this episode into context, the context or the whole person, his whole life.

The fact is that you liked Barney back when he was a self-described slob. You liked him when his mother starred in his ads. You’ve always liked his politics, his grit, his one-liners. You like having a smart-mouth congressman. Seven out of ten of you re-elected him. And that was after he’d come out of the closet.

So, at first there is remarkably little said about it. It’s as if something embarrassing had happened to a member of the family. In Fall River, you shake your head and say, “Jeez.” In Newton, you meet and quote your grandmother, “Smart, smart, but stupid.” For the most part you hope the oil slick will evaporate, or get mopped up with sponges.

But the damn thing doesn’t go away.

There was the matter of the parking tickets. Big deal, you say. There was a question of taxes for Gobie’s time as a driver. Spare me, you say. So he was snookered by the guy? Is it a crime to be naive? None of it sounds like the Barney, the one you know, but the guy made mistakes, and you make allowances. Because in the district you like him.

Barney starts talking about how these things happen. What it’s like to be gay and lonely, to try and lead an entirely public life, to fail that. He talks about what it was like to admit his homosexuality, to deal with it. There was, he says, more than one prostitute.

In the district, where you don’t really want to know this, you hear it with some sympathy. Maybe you run through the Rolodex of friends who’ve gone through a different transition, from married to divorced. How many of them would want to see their dumbest or most desperate acts in the news? How much worse is it to come out into a world that calls homosexuals “queers”?

Because you are a part of a liberal district, you tell yourself, hey, it was a bad time. He was hurting and stumbling and it’s past history. Today he’s in what you call a stable relationship while you might not be comfortable welcoming Barney’s companion on the campaign trail, hey, you have to be happy that he’s happier. After all, you like the guy. Better we should go after HUD scandal.

But somehow or other, the same oil slick has started to cover the rocks and accumulate on the beaches and it just doesn’t scrub off. In the district, you talk about the scandal more, not less. The arguments you use to defend the guy you like become more complicated, more layered. Harder.

You try to imagine Barney in front of that ethics committee and you want to cringe. Somebody’s going to ask him how many hookers he hired, how such a smart guy could have been conned. You imagine him, without trying, as the new poster boy for the right-wing hate mail.

You think about that crude oil sticking to the causes that he cares about, that you care about. You think about how “local issues” in the 4th Congressional District have included Central America and homelessness and civil liberties. Can a guy represent you without representing those?

The jokes were once by Barney. Now they are about him. You have no idea how long the clean-up of his reputation will take. Or if it can ever be the same.

Because you like the guy, like his politics, because he’s the home team, you’d vote for him again. Probably. But more of you discover that you’ve gone from being proud to being defensive and not a little embarrassed.

And so now you want to tell him, Barney, it won’t wash. Give it up.