David Broder Is Not the Dean of Me (And I Do Not Cry for Charlie Rangel)

If David Broder wants to weep for Charlie Rangel, that is his business. What bothers me, though, about Broder's Washington Post column justifying and praising the censured congressman, is the mortifying suggestion that the long-serving "dean of the Washington press corps" is speaking for, as he says outright at one point, "many of us in the press gallery.''

I hope that's not the case, as I not only disagree with nearly every word of "Happy Warriors Brought Low," but see in it much of what America minds about our poor, ailing industry.

"This was a sad time for many of us watching Charlie Rangel receive the censure of his colleagues in the House of Representatives,'' Broder wrote, "not because of our disagreement with their judgment'' – because what's a little rule-breaking among friends? – but as a tip of the hat to Rangel's "irrepressible personality . . . keen intelligence, street smarts and a wonderful, self-mocking sense of humor. To see him brought low is nothing but painful.''

Now, nobody with a heart is doing the happy dance over the ethical bankruptcy of a decorated war hero. But if I were to cry, it would not be for someone whose comportment screams that rules are for the little people, but for the harm Rangel's hubris has done the righteous causes he's fought for all of his adult life.

After his censure, an unrepentant Rangel told a cheering crowd at a Harlem hospital that among other things he had not done, "I did not go to bed with kids" – Congratulations! – "I did not hurt the House speaker'' – Um, was he tempted? -- "I did not start a revolution against the United States of America, I did not steal any money, I did not take any bribes.'' Rangel says he was merely "sloppy" in his bookkeeping and "overzealous" in his fund-raising. Hey, and if voters elsewhere in the land had him in mind when they voted out Democrats in favor of candidates who want to repeal health care reform, then c'est la guerre, right?

According to Broder, this outrage of accountability was doubly painful because it reopened an old wound; when another chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, was voted out of office over a scandal and later went to jail, "many of us in the press gallery felt the same sense of loss.''

Why? Because both Rangel and Rosty broke the rules so jauntily: "The pursuit of power is what brings people into politics, and some of them pursue it with a grim determination never to be outmaneuvered. You can stand back and watch them work, but there seems to be no joy in them -- or in the spectacle they provide. It's a deadly serious business, this fundraising, vote-counting, always manipulating treadmill, for the Tom DeLays and the Nancy Pelosis of this world. When one of them slips off that treadmill, you look to see who may replace them, but you shed no tears.''

Stop! Why not be jolly, while skipping out on the taxes owed on the income on one's villa? And can we please pause to answer the SAT question: Which one doesn't fit? Let's see, of the two joyful and two supposedly joyless lawmakers Broder appraises here -- Rangel, Rosty, DeLay and Pelosi -- Rangel has done a lot for Harlem, but got in trouble for failing to report income and pay taxes on it, which is rather a big deal if you, a) argue that Sweden has it right and we all ought to happily pay our fair share, and b) run the House committee that writes the tax code. He also solicited money from corporations with business before his committee for a City College center with his name on it – and for good measure, sent the fundraising letters on official stationery. And if Dante were a modern-day New Yorker, which circle of Hell do you suppose would be reserved for those who, also like Rangel, hogged four rent-controlled apartments while representing a constituency for which there is not exactly an abundance of affordable housing?

Rostenkowski, who died of lung cancer this past August, helped write the legislation that created Medicare in 1966 but went down over his role in the House Post Office scandal. Accused of hiring "ghost" employees who did little to nothing, spending public money on gifts and redeeming for cash the tax-financed stamps intended for his letters to constituents, he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of mail fraud and served 15 months in jail, plus two more in a halfway house.

DeLay, who I never thought of as grim prior to his booty-shaking on "Dancing With the Stars" – was recently found guilty of money laundering.

And Pelosi? She passed health care reform, was the target of $65 million in attack ads, and though no one could argue she left anything on the field, watched her party lose 63 House seats last month. Her crime, I guess, is seeing her work as such "deadly serious business.''

The idea that politicians are graded by reporters according to their entertainment value is offensive. Here journalists are, working harder than ever trying to preserve some kind of watchdog function with fewer resources and smaller staffs -- while David Broder would seem to be confirming the worst fears of our fiercest detractors -- namely, that we're so star-struck by anyone with a little power that we don't care what rules they break as long as they keep us amused: OK, so he was sketchy, but quelle joie de vivre!

Even worse: "What was different about Rangel and Rostenkowski was the sheer joy with which they played the game and the way they would let you know that, whatever the policy stakes, a game is what it was to them.'' (Dodge ball, maybe? Or kick the can?) Rosty "always hugely enjoyed the game he was part of'' – and "Rangel is the same way, with the added dimension of the Harlem hipster who reveled in his ability to play the street game as well as anybody.''

One similarity Broder does not mention is that by the time Rostenkowski was voted out of office in 1994, he had come to symbolize all that was seen as wrong with Washington in the months leading up to Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution – just as Rangel, though revered in his home district, became in much of the rest of the country emblematic of the Democratic Party's failure to "drain the swamp'' just prior to his party's "shellacking" at the polls in '10.

"He and Rosty had the same view of the hometown patronage games that brought them down. They wanted the perks that went with their positions of power. But they used them more often to help others along than for themselves, and they weren't greedy. Often, they were just sloppy about the demands of the new era of politics.''

Or the new era of journalism?

"It makes you weep to see someone like this fall.''

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