Aw: I’ll miss Charlie Rangel when he’s gone

Charlie Rangel is a holdover from the days when Democrats were more comfortable in pool halls than coffee houses, when the party had a deep, organic link to America’s working class. His relationship to the poor voters of his Harlem district is not one of compassion, but of solidarity, the solidarity of a man who might himself have ended up on the streets had not the G.I. bill given him an education.

The House of Representatives will soon be run by people who believe that America would an almost perfect society if only government got out of the way. Rangel knows that’s not true; less because he is enthralled to any counter-ideology than because he has seen it disproven in his own life. The Democratic Party of Charlie Rangel—and of Tip 0’Neill and Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther—is almost gone, replaced by a party with less of a gut-level attachment to those on society’s margins. It’s fitting that Rangel would be preparing to leave just as Barack Obama considers backing behind a plan to extend the Bush tax cuts even for millionaires. Given the way things in Congress are going, I can’t imagine why Rangel would want to stay.