By Mark Rhoads
President Barack Obama told CBS News yesterday that it's time for the 80-year-old former Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) to end his career "with dignity." Too late.
"I think Charlie Rangel served a very long time and served-- his constituents very well. But these-- allegations are very troubling," The Obama statement came after eight House Democrats also called on Rangel to resign his seat in Congress rather than face a full trial by the House Ethics Committee.
Bus, Meet Rep. Rangel, Mr. Rangel, Meet the Bus. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) will be under there with you shortly to keep you company.
Both parties in America stage spectacular scandals from time to time but this year the Democrats are winning that race by a good margin.
President Obama and several House Democrats are not asking Rep. Charlie Rangel to resign his seat because they have had a suddend attack of scruples. This is about damage control and self-preservation and House Democrats do not want two separate ethics trials for two prominent House Democrats going on at the same time right before the November elections.
Of the two cases, the charges against Rep. Maxine Waters are easier to understand. She arranged for Treasury Deparment officials to meet with directors of Unity One Bank and they got 12 million dollars in TARP money but she never disclosed that her husband was on the board of directors of the bank that got the money. The Obama Administration and Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner were not eager to uncover this fact for themselves.
Rep. Rangel is charged by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee with a variety of violations of House rules among the most serious being the use of four rent-subsidize appartments in New York City and one of them as a campaign office. A rent subsidy is only supposed to be for a primary personal residence, not for investment properties or sublet apartments to cronies. The committee had also investigated Rangel's failure to report income from the lawmaker's rental unit at the Punta Cana Yacht Club in the Dominican Republic.
Rangel also belatedly disclosed hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment assets on either his House ethics forms or his income tax returns. This misdeed was done by the Chairman of the Commiteee of the House that writes tax laws for eveyrone else. Rangel already has resigned as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee but now his seat in Congress is in jeopardy.
Because Rangel did not negotiate a settlement with the committee in time to meet a deadline, Republicans on the Commitee insisted that Rangel must go to trial and now Democrats are starting to panic that news media will be consumed with two Democratic scandals at the same time in the month before the election.
What Rangel and Waters are accused of doing by not seem like much by Illinois scandal standards, it is serious enough to merit the attnetion of MSM in the nation's capital city and that makes Democratic leaders such as Speaker Pelosi and Rep. Stenny Hoyer (D-Maryland) worry about the negative fallout for many House Democratic campaigns. The fastest way to neutralize the potential problem is to get Rangel and Waters to resign their seats but both are stubborn and have nothing else to go to but politics and holding office.
President Obama has joined the let them resign chorus also for reasons of self preservation. Obama now has a well-documented habit of throwing his former allies under the bus to clear himself of any guilt by association. That is what he did to his own grandmother in the April 2008 Philadelphia speech after the Rev. Jeremia Wright story first broke. That is what he did to Wright himself a few weeks later. That is what he has done to three major statewide Democratic candidates, Creigh Deeds in Virignia, Gov. John Corzine in New Jersey, and Attorney General Martha Coakley in Massachusetts.
Obama tried to clear himself of any blame for those three defeats by claiming they had nothing to do with him or his unpopular policies and the Democratic candidates ran bad campaigns in spite of his heroic help.
Obama himself might be entirely clear of Rangel's misdeeds but the Maxine Waters case could be different depending on how high the Treasury officials were that she met with. Whatever, Maxine is now a political liability to Obama and House Democrats and don't be surprised to see Obama ask for her resignation soon also. There is already some grumbling by members of the Congressional Black Caucus that Obama is strictly for Obama and he really does not care how many House seats the Democrats lose.
Apparently Obama thinks that Bill Clinton hit the right formula after Democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994 due to House bank scandals and the Hillary over reach on health care reform. Many mistakenly thought Bill Clinton would be a lame duck with GOP control of Congress in 1995 but Bill Clinton hyped the negative image of Newt Gingrich and the House Replublicans in 1995 and then rolled over the aging and ineffective Bob Dole in 1996.
The lesson for Obama is that if your own campaign is all you care about, then others will have to be sacrificed for the greater good of the Obama campaign in 2012.
