Rangel also needed Gutierrez for physical support to get up the steps – the result of a mysterious virus that spread into the lawmaker’s spine over the winter, leaving him in an intensive-care unit, unable to walk and out of public view for months. Rumors spread that he was on his deathbed, and challengers sprang up in a newly drawn district that added 100,000 constituents that Rangel had never represented.
With the right mix of antibiotics and a still daily IV, Rangel is back in the fight, making what most believe is a final stand. Even if he can’t traverse steps on his own, he’s moved from a wheelchair to a walker and now to a sleek black cane that serves as both a balance beam and a weapon to wave at his detractors.
“Adrenaline is something that comes when you need it, and I got it,” Rangel told reporters Friday after a health-care event in East Harlem.
One of the main reasons he’s got it, friends and allies say, is because he very much wants to protect his legacy.
According to friends, Rangel doesn’t want to retire so soon after being censured by his fellow House members in 2010 for a series of ethical breaches that also caused him to relinquish his gavel as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. A vindication by voters and a longer run in Congress would help ensure that his 42 years in Congress isn’t defined by his scandal — as it was for his friend, the late Dan Rostenkowski, whose last congressional act was a guilty plea that came to overshadow his 36-year career.
“He wants to make sure his good name is clear. He wants his good name restored,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), who counts Rangel as his political mentor.
Other admirers privately suggest that he has become so attached to the trappings of power that he cannot fathom leaving them behind. During House votes recently, Rangel told one retiring congressman that, “you are about to become a nobody,” according to the lawmaker, who requested anonymity to speak freely.
Chief challenger
State Sen. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) knows that Rangel is somebody.
Espaillat, 57, sought out Rangel’s support for the New York state Senate in 2010, winning a competitive Democratic primary and claiming that seat. But a new opportunity presented itself for the Dominican-born lawmaker, who immigrated to New York with his family when he was 9. The final lines of the 13th Congressional District ended with a population that was 55 percent Hispanic in what was once considered the black capital of America.
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