Richard Whalen

In the incredibly expensive, completely unforgiving blood sport of presidential politics, there are no parties, philosophies or ideologies as intellectuals imagine. As an operative, I have spent forty years in the arena learning there are only winners and losers. And winning is the whole game.

After a season of extravagant buildup and premature praise, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top-tier rival, the youthful Barack Obama, is now favored by only 23 percent in the polls. He is no longer a fresh face and is being cut down to size by many fellow Democrats who previously hailed him as the alternative to Hillary.

Obama is like a rookie baseball player rushed up to the major league “show” unseasoned. Now he must prove he can hit really wicked curves and sliders.

Here’s my practical, strategic suggestion for Obama: visit the smartest African-American Democratic politician alive – Representative Charlie Rangel of New York’s Harlem -- and explore a tactical alliance with an invaluable potential mentor. Obama needs something important and substantive to talk about. Rangel needs help with what he calls “the Mother of all Tax Reforms.”

Seventy-seven year-old Charlie Rangel, after waiting decades, has at last risen to the chairmanship of the Congressional tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. A lifelong “tax and spend” liberal, Rangel last month unveiled a long-awaited “reform” of federal tax policy that would sharply raise taxes for two-income families earning $200,000 a year; eliminate the alternative minimum tax (AMT); provide additional breaks for low and middle income households and overhaul corporate taxes. While Rangel acknowledges that his proposal has little chance of passage this year or next, reports the New York Times (10/30/07), the election of a heavily Democratic Congress in 2008 would give Rangel’s political and legislative reforms the chance of a lifetime.

Obama’s great opportunity is to become the current and future champion of Rangel’s dream to ensure that 90 million Americans would pay lower taxes under his proposal that would impact the neglected younger, educated voters and families like himself who are heavily overtaxed. These high earners, once called Yuppies, are exposed to the so-called “alternative minimum tax” (AMT) that was stuck in the code 30 years ago to prevent the very rich and well-advised from avoiding all federal taxes. Now, the AMT turns the law upside down and eliminates almost all middle-class personal exemptions and itemized deductions, like state taxes and mortgage interest payments.

In any 2008 election Democratic Congressional sweep, tax reform that “soaks the rich” would be near the top of the party’s legislative agenda. “What Rangel has done is put out a coherent plan,” Robert E. Rubin told The New York Times. Rubin, who was Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton and is now chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup, added: “You may like it; you may not like it. But it starts a discussion.”

Obama can establish his claim on the future by identifying himself with AMT reform, sparing the younger, educated classes who are the driving force of America’s knowledge-based, high-tech economy and are the decisive voters of tomorrow.