Charlie Rangel is a shameless self-promoter who proceeds from any meeting at the White House to the flock of reporters that congregates outside the West Wing. His accounts never bear much resemblance to reality, but they get him in the paper. In soliciting funds to build a $30 million monument to himself, Rangel takes egotism to heights unseen outside the fiction of Ayn Rand.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel is soliciting donations from corporations with business interests before his panel, hoping to raise $30 million for a new academic center that will house his papers when he retires. The New York Democrat has penned letters on congressional stationery and has sought meetings to ask for corporate and foundation contributions for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York, a project that caused controversy last year when he won a $1.9 million congressional earmark to help start it. Republican critics dubbed the project Rangel’s “Monument to Me.”
