In a long bio-article about Barney Frank, the chairman of the House's Financial Services committee, a portrait of a practical, intelligent, and committed liberal who is a realist about housing. Frank's expertise is in housing and he envisions a government fund that provides subsidies for building low-income rental housing. The fund would be outside of the usual congressional appropriations process by coming from a profit center in FHA oversight and was supposed to come partially from the profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Frank was unable to get much momentum for the kinds of regulatory oversight he thought Fannie and Freddie needed, mostly blaming the anti-regulation ideology of the GOP, and their control of congress from 1994-2006. Aside from talking about his biography, the article gives blow-by-blow details of Frank's involvement with the financial bailout and the auto industry bailout process. Barney Frank is presented not as a blind liberal idealist who ignored the GOP's concerns over Fannie & Freddie's riskiness (the common theme in the conservative financial press) but instead as a pragmatist whose efforts have been stymied over the years by GOP ideology of deregulation.
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