Barney Frank on Senate: 'Coach, Put Me In!'

Barney Frank wants to temporarily fill John Kerry's probably-soon-to-be-empty Senate seat, and he's not making a secret of it. "I'm not going to be coy. It's not something I've ever been good at. I've told the governor that I would now like, frankly, to do that," the retired congressman told Morning Joe today. "Coach, put me in!" Just weeks earlier, Frank had said he was happily retired and not interested—"it was kind of like you're about to graduate and they said, 'You gotta go to summer school,'" he quipped today.

But now he's changed his mind, because the three months he'd have the job for would be "among the most important months in American financial [history]." Frank tells the Boston Globe that he's eager to wrap up the fiscal cliff mess, and thinks he can work with moderate Republicans to reform Social Security and Medicare in a progressive way. So will Deval Patrick pick him? Well, when Frank expressed interest, "he said, 'Thank you for telling me.' As you expect, he was noncommittal." Frank says he's still not interested in running to fill Kerry's seat permanently. (More Barney Frank stories.)