There’s a comic aspect to some of the ethics charges against Rep. Charles Rangel, like the one involving his 1972 Mercedes-Benz. Evidently, it sat for years under a tarpaulin in the garage directly below his office in Washington, gathering dust — a violation of a rule that Capitol garages can’t be used for long-term storage.
Gee. Call the cops.
This is the thing about the Rangel ethics violations — one by one, they don’t seem like that big a deal.
So he took over a couple of rent-controlled apartments and had the rent paid for, one of them by his re-election campaign. Surely many people in New York living in rent-controlled apartments are involved in something akin to a scam.
So he played fast and loose on reporting some taxable income; millions do.
So he sought special earmarks and tax loopholes for a center named after him at City College and for those who would donate to it — that’s just how the system works, right?
I’m sure this “everybody does it” attitude is what got Rangel into all this trouble. He’s been playing the part of the ebullient, straight-talking Big Personality for so long there’s no separating the caricature from the man himself.
In 2008, when a Post reporter asked him about his mystery car, he responded, “I told you I am not discussing that. I want to be kind and gentle.”
Translation: You have your part to play (hit-job journalist), I have mine (slippery pol). Game on.
Well, the game is all but over for Rangel now, and there’s a glaring irony in the fact that he has been brought so low by these relatively minor infractions.
For the fact is Rangel has a great deal to answer for. He has been the dominant political actor for four decades in the nation’s most important African-American community. Yet he deserves little or no credit for the stunning upturn in Harlem’s fortunes over the last decade.
But he does deserve some blame for the economic misery and stagnation that was Harlem’s lot for the first 25 years of his DC tenure.
He helped build a patchwork of organizations and nonprofits through which public money from Washington and Albany and City Hall was supposed to be delivered to the people of Harlem. In case after case, that money enriched the groups and left Harlem fallow.
He was the guiding force behind the Harlem Urban Development Corporation, a state agency that spent $100 million over the course of 23 years before it was folded into a larger entity in 1995. Two years later, a shocking audit revealed, in the words of former state official William Stern, that it “accomplished absolutely nothing — except [for] the people who ran it . . . HUDC treated public money as one big private slush fund.”
The folding of HUDC was greeted by Rangel with apocalyptic words: “This seems like the end of development in Harlem as we have known it.”
The opposite was true. The destruction and marginalization of Rangel’s many cream-skimming groups — the HUDC, the Apollo Foundation and the East Harlem Abyssinian Triangle among them — was vital to getting real, honest, private-sector development going in Harlem.
Once it became clear that there was another path for the private sector that didn’t go directly through Rangel or his associates, Harlem changed for the better.
Also vital to the change was the vertiginous crime drop of the Giuliani ’90s, the result of policies Rangel bad-mouthed at the time and whose brave implementers he has continued to bad-mouth, with his offhanded talk last year about white NYPD cops who would shoot Barack Obama because they wouldn’t know who he was.
We shall not see the likes of him again — the guy who sounds like he’s Ed Koch’s Uncle Sidney, the one who knows the score, and knows you know the score, and knows you know he knows.
Without question, Rangel has always wanted to do right by the people who elected him. He has just had all the wrong ideas about how.
johnpodhoretz@gmail.com