Don't play "Taps" just yet for "Say Good Night, Charlie" Rangel

Rep. Charlie Rangel with then-NYS Assemblyman (now NYS
Sen.) Adriano Espaillat, who wants to run for the 13th CD seat

"Charlie's an incumbent and as a district leader I will not support somebody turning against an incumbent. I think Charlie has done a good job for us."

-- Washington Heights Democratic district leader Maria Luna,
who was presumed to be supporting challenger Adriano Espaillat

by Ken

When I wrote day before yesterday about the challenge my state senator, Adriano Espaillat, is preparing to mount for the Democratic nomination in my congressional district, New York's redrawn 13th, I wondered if it was time to "say good night, Charlie" to disgraced Rep. Charlie Rangel. I speculated that what could save him in his bid for yet another term (he's been in Congress since 1971) is the likely multitude of primary contenders whenever NYC Dems smell a congressional opening -- quite possibly enough to fragment the vote enought to enable him to slide through, in a district that by the way is now majority Hispanic.

What didn't occur to me was that Senator Espaillat might be so quickly left dangling by presumed supporters. From DNAinfo.com's Jill Colvin (links onsite):

Espaillat Losing Allies to Rangel in Tough Uptown Congressional Race

April 5, 2012 7:47am | By Jill Colvin, DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

UPPER MANHATTAN -- It had threatened to spark a race war -- a bitter showdown between black and Latino voters in Upper Manhattan that would set the stage for "20 years of nuclear political war."

But the racially driven showdown predicted before State Sen. Adriano Espaillat announced he would challenge Rep. Charles Rangel for his Congressional seat appears to be failing to materialize.

Instead, some prominent Latino leaders, including key early Espaillat backers, are throwing their support behind the longtime Harlem politician instead of the up-and-coming star who would become the country’s first Dominican-American congressman.

Most visible is Dominican-born Maria Luna, a Democratic district leader and longtime fixture in Washington Heights, who is backing Rangel despite having appeared by Espaillat's side at rallies ahead of his announcement and having served as one of seven members of Espaillat’s Congressional exploratory committee.

"Charlie's an incumbent and as a district leader I will not support somebody turning against an incumbent," she explained. "I think Charlie has done a good job for us."

Luna said that, while she would have endorsed Espaillat in a run for a new, majority Latino district, the effort was never intended to take the seat from Rangel, who has represented Harlem, the Upper West Side, Washington Heights and Inwood for more than 40 years. . . .

[A]s uptown leaders are forced to take sides, allegiances are proving more complicated than a simple break along ethnic lines, demonstrating the enduring power of Rangel's legacy despite his 2010 censure for a series of ethics violations and a severe back injury that has put him out of commission for nearly two months.

At least one other member of Espaillat’s exploratory committee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, will also not support Espaillat in the primary against Rangel, DNAinfo has learned.

Political experts agreed that it is "highly unusual" for members of a candidate’s exploratory committee to endorse rival candidates.

"It's very unusual and it's not helpful," said veteran Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf. "It shows disunity within a campaign." . . .

I hadn't expected to be writing again so soon about the struggle for the Democratic nomination in my congressional district, the new 13th, which was finally established as part of the redistricting plan finally ordered, more or less at the last possible legal moment for doing so, by the courts after our esteemed state legislature, with its Republican-controlled Senate and Democratic-controlled Assembly, proved unequal to the job of drawing new district lines. (Assembly Democrats might have been able to do some kind of deal, but those Senate Republicans truly are the lowest of low-lifes.)

It's a very different CD, this new 13th, in which "Say Good Night, Charlie" finds that he's thrown his hat. For a while there it looked like he might not have anywhere to throw that hat, when some of the great minds in the legislature had the idea of making his one of the two NYS CDs to be axed in the wake of the 2010 census. That scheme was linked -- and probably unlinked as well -- to an idea to string together heavily Hispanic chunks of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens to create a district for a Hispanic congressman. (It would take pretty strong string to accomplish that stringing together, but state legislatures have become pretty adept at this kind of electoral arts-and-crafts project.)

The "Hispanic district" didn't happen either, and what we wound up with was this new 13th CD. Oh, I've heard and read a bunch of times which areas got taken away and which grafted onto Charlie's old 15th CD, but I have a hard enough time keeping track of who my various legislative representatives are. If you really want to know, you can Google it easily enough. I do know that the new 13th actually has a Hispanic majority, if only barely, and even if it's not thr dreamt-of designated Hispanic CD, it's not hard to understand why Senator Espaillat has been feeling a powerful itch to contest that seat. As I noted Tuesday, he announced on Sunday that he's formed the exploratory committee mentioned by Jill Colvin.

Espaillat is a good guy. I've had no difficulty voting for him, first as my state assemblyman, more recently as my state senator, when he ran for the seat my former senator, now-NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, gave up to run for his present job. (By the way, I've mentioned that I periodically walk past Schneiderman's Senate district office whenever I take the A train, and if you're looking for ground-floor office space on Bennett Avenue in Washington Heights just a couple of blocks from the subway, it's still available.)

I wrote about "Say Good Night" Charlie on Tuesday in something like elegiac mode, or at any rate as close to elegiac mode as the congressman will allow, considering that at 81 he won't go quietly, but instead insists on scratching and clawing for an 11th term. In his 40-plus years (my apologies for wildly understating the actual number of terms he's served on Tuesday; I must have been thinking just of the currently configured district), but he's also earned a good deal of shame, including being stripped of his poweful Ways and Means Committee chairmanship and being formally censured for ethics violations.

I wondered Tuesday whether Charlie hadn't, over the years, been transformed into a political encrustation very different from what he set out to be all those decades ago. What we're seeing now, though, with area Dems starting to close ranks around him rather than doing everything they can to persuade him to retire (relatively) gracefully, is one of the horrible old ways that political machinery continues to work. Whether it's loyalty or fear that motivates the pols rallying to Charlie's behalf, it's bad government and bad politics -- and, most discouragingly, bad for the constitutents of the new 13th CD.

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