Barney Frank to Retire

Barney Frank has decided not to run for reelection next year, he announced today at a typically feisty press conference in Newton, Mass. “It would have been a rough campaign,” he said, according to the Boston Globe. “I don’t like raising money.” Frank has $760,000 in his campaign coffers, but said he’d need a few million more to compete in his newly redrawn district, which lost the working-class city of New Bedford and gained several conservative towns.

Frank said he’d wanted to announce his retirement last year, but waited for fear of looking weak in Congress. “A funny thing happened on my way to retirement,” he said, according to CBS. “A very conservative Republican majority took over the House... [and] the things I fought hardest for could be in jeopardy.” So what’s next for Frank? “I will neither be a lobbyist nor a historian,” he said, poking fun at Newt Gingrich’s Freddie Mac ties; instead, the 71-year-old will do “some combination of writing, teaching, and lecturing.” The best part? “I don’t have to pretend to be nice to people I don’t like.” (More Barney Frank stories.)