Politics' finest hours in the past? That's a myth

If only to spare us from boredom, civic leaders and commentators need to refrain from overdoing their acclaim for the previous political generation, its finest hours, its magical moments and its famous figures.

Some TV talkers wailed this week about a "culture of corruption" revealed in the misconduct case against Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) - as if to suggest this kind of story was new, or that we haven't been hearing the same and worse about one Washington, D.C., figure or another for all our lives.

"Oh, what has it come to" rings kind of hollow.

Consider the New York congressional delegation with which the newly ruined Rangel once served in the 1970s. Some, for sure, left office with the legacy of honorable service; a number of others did not. Congressmen with the names Bert Podell and Frank Brasco and others would be convicted in separate corruption cases. Staten Island Rep. Vito Fossella came undone in a sensational personal scandal in 2008, but his forerunner from the 1970s, John Murphy, would get caught in an FBI sting called Abscam.

Consider the powerful party leadership around the region in the mid-1970s. In the Bronx you had Democratic chairman Patrick Cunningham, whom Gov. Hugh Carey would make state chairman. In Brooklyn you had Democratic boss Meade Esposito. Nassau had GOP chairman Joseph Margiotta and Suffolk, GOP chairman Edwin ("Buzz") Schwenck.

Each boss had his own style and legend and charm. And each would end up convicted of crimes.

While Rangel's saga unfolded, governor-elect Andrew Cuomo, visiting Buffalo, talked about how the fiscal crisis of the 1970s "brought people together" to do "innovative work" and "cooperative work."

Cuomo's aim is transparent and logical enough - to make the current fiscal crunch into a chance to force players to reach constructive agreements.

Cuomo likes in his travels to cite a well-woven biography titled "The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975" by Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner. It details the multilayered negotiations involved in steering New York City from the brink of insolvency.

As writer Jim Callaghan said in a retrospective of his own, the upshot included: layoffs of police and firefighters; the end of free tuition at City University; higher transit fares and taxes and appointed monitors to oversee finances, compromising representative government. Serious study of the actions of the past can be useful, of course, as a guide to what can and cannot work. But gauzy views can get silly. Nine months ago, after Richard Ravitch took office as lieutenant governor, he was described in one newspaper story as "a throwback to a time when wise men ruled New York."

Yeah? Weeks later, it became clear Ravitch's comprehensive plan for fiscal reform would be ignored at the state Capitol - regardless of the 76-year-old real estate developer's presumed status as one of the wise giants who roamed the earth.

The better-old-days narrative even has its hole in the still-simmering story of convicted state comptroller Alan Hevesi. As a young man, Hevesi worked for a widely respected Queens state senator named Seymour Thaler. In 1973 Thaler was caught "fencing" a U.S. Treasury bond.

This is another instance in which public officials would do well to skip the veneration of those who came before and just focus earnestly on the problems at hand.

What has it all come to? Pretty much what it has been.