Faith In Government

Jeffrey Toobin has a very good profile of Barney Frank in this week's New Yorker. One anecdote that stuck out to me was the following:

“My father ran a truck stop,” Frank told me. “He sort of lived on the fringes. We’re talking about Hudson Countyâ€"Frank Hague was the bossâ€"a totally corrupt place. In 1946, my father’s brother Harry got the contract to sell cars to the city, and of course he had to give a kickback to the guys who ran the city. My father was a middleman or something.” Sam was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about the matter. He refused and was found in criminal contempt. “For a while, he was hiding out from the cops in New York,” Frank recalled. “I was six years old, and once I went to see him in the city, and we saw ‘Robin Hood,’ with Errol Flynn. The next day, the cops came to my first-grade class to interview me, to see if I had been with my dad. My father’s sister, Aunt Minnie, taught at the school. She heard about the cops coming and went straight to my classroom to break it up, so I didn’t have to talk.”

Eventually, Sam returned to New Jersey, and was jailed for refusing to testify. “They treated him nice,” Frank said. “They let my mother bring him food. He served for about a year.” The incident notwithstanding, Frank’s parents instilled in their children a belief in the power of the government to do good.

I have to say, if a kid whose father goes on the lam and gets him questioned by the police as a kid can retain a fondness for government, it shouldn't be THAT hard for President-elect Obama to rebrand government as cool, should it?