By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — Representative Barney Frank, the rumpled, cantankerous chairman of the Financial Services Committee, plopped down on a leather bench off the House floor last week. After two months of trying to win Republican support for his bill to help homeowners at risk of foreclosure, he had come up short.

The White House had just threatened a veto.
But Mr. Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat and the most prominent gay member of Congress, who always seems on the verge of an outburst, was more philosophical than combustible as he explained the administration’s opposition.

Between an economic stimulus package and the Federal Reserve’s rescue of Wall Street, he said, “they have been pushed into accepting a lot of government help for the market.”

“People aren’t good at doing things they dislike,” he added.

Then, in a flash of trademark wit, he said that asking the White House to support more government intervention was “like asking me to judge the Miss America contest — if your heart’s not in it, you don’t do a very good job.”

With relations between the White House and the Democratic Congress growing more acidic as the presidential election approaches, Mr. Frank, 68 and in his 14th term, has emerged as a key deal-maker, an unlikely bridge between his party’s left-wing base and the free-market conservatives in the administration, particularly Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.

In the process, Mr. Frank has won praise, even from some Republican colleagues in the House who generally disagree with his politics but say he has treated them with a fair hand and an eye toward compromise.

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When Representative Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, criticized a component of the housing bill that would give money to local governments to buy and repair foreclosed properties, saying it would not protect homeowners from foreclosure, Mr. Frank fired back that preventing foreclosures was the goal of a different bill.

“The notion that this bill doesn’t keep people out of foreclosure is true,” he said. “It doesn’t combat global warming. It doesn’t get troops out of Iraq. It won’t help me lose weight. There are a lot of things this bill won’t do that I very much want to do. None of them are a reason to vote against a bill that doesn’t do what it doesn’t say it’s going to do but does what it does. What it does is go to the aid of cities that have been victimized.”