![]() His wit and flair for confrontation ensure that he'll be in high demand and perhaps do some college teaching. The Massachusetts congressman said that he'd like to hit the lecture circuit. Like a lot of people, he wouldn't mind making more money while working less hard."I've always felt I was a better legislator than candidate," he said. "It would mean campaigning pretty much full-time in this new district, because they are new people, and they're not obvious automatic votes for me." And at age 71, the prospect of introducing himself to 325,000 new voters was not all that appealing. ![]() "The problem with the district from my standpoint is that it would be very timeconsuming," he said. He likely would have had far less time to work on financial policy and military spending. In order to win re-election, he would have needed to spend a lot of time campaigning. Over the last year, Frank has been focused on two issues: defending the Dodd-Frank Reform Act and pushing for cuts in military spending. He didn't want to do what was necessary to win.Unfortunately, only half of it was for me. "That is, what happened particularly last year was, I raised an enormous amount of money. "I've become one of the great fund raisers in Congress-in gross, not so much in net," he quipped. Plus, as a high-profile lightning rod in Congress, he had reason to think he'd face a wellfunded opponent. Next year likely would have been tougher, since Frank's district south of Boston has lots of new Republican voters as a result of redistricting. In 2010, when he was chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, he beat a 35-year-old rookie candidate by 11 percentage points, hardly an overwhelming margin. Though Frank said in a "Today" show interview that he thought he'd win re-election, he couldn't be sure. Here's a condensed version of Frank's reasoning: Barney Frank began his retirement press conference by saying, "I'm just going to explain my reasons, which are a little complicated." Fifty minutes later, it was clear that a mix of personal and professional reasons factored into the powerful House Democrat's decision to bow out.
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