The two most successful African-American politicians in recent New York history are on the ropes.  David Paterson, the first African-American governor in the history of the Empire State, is being driven from office by wave after wave of allegations.  Charles Rangel, the most colorful New York politician since Adam Clayton Powell, and the most powerful African-American congressman in the state’s history, has ‘temporarily’ surrendered his gavel at the Ways and Means Committee.

As Joe Conason notes over at Slate.com, in a spirited though ultimately unconvincing defense of Rangel, the Harlem congressman is being hounded from high office by, primarily, The New York Times.  The same thing is true of Governor Paterson; the Times has consistently led in the publication of stories which have undermined his credibility, ruined his public character and now exposed him to criminal prosecution.

Unlike Conason, I’m not mad at the Times for uncovering these facts.  I’m hoping this signals a new era at the Times of an intense concentration on the murky world of New York City and state politics.  There is no other newspaper in this state which has the resources and the reputation to take on the entrenched cultures of corruption and incompetence which are destroying the city and state and blighting millions of lives both upstate and down.  You go, Grey Lady!

But there’s no doubt that the sudden attention paid to the sins of high-profile black officials is not going down well with everyone.  Most New Yorkers think that you can’t throw a rock in our unspeakable legislature without hitting a crook; where are the corrupt white (and Latino and Asian-American) criminals doing the perp walk on the Grey Lady’s front page?  I hope they’ll come; one way for the Times to rebuild its reputation and credibility — and incidentally perform a signal service to the city and state — is to own the story of corruption here and to undertake a major effort to clean this mess up.

Conason (one of the most consistently readable columnists in the business even when, like now, he’s wrong) seems to think that another strategy is possible: Democrats should circle the wagons around their vulnerable leaders, just as the GOP did for, say, Tom DeLay.

There are two reasons he’s wrong.  First, this didn’t work out that well for the GOP and it won’t work any better for the Dems.  Fighting to save Congressman Rangel would give every GOP candidate in the country something like a five percent boost in the polls.  Or does Conason think voters won’t notice if the Democrats stand by their ethically-challenged comrades in arms?

The second reason this won’t work is that the cause of ‘good government’ isn’t just a slogan for a significant chunk of the Democratic base.  The ‘goo-goos‘ really believe in government and they really believe that for the state to work well it must be led by the pure in heart.  It’s easy for hardened New York journalists like Conason (and, I suppose, Mead) to sneer at the delicate sensibilities of Boston blue noses and genteel civic reformers, but take the upper middle class neo-Puritan goody-goodies out of the mix and there isn’t all that much left of the Democratic Party.

These folks, spiritually if not biologically descended from the original New England Puritans, really believe that the state is here to make virtue reign among men.  In the nineteenth century they were the ‘Conscience Whigs’ who opposed Sabbath delivery of the mails, the relocation of the Cherokee Indians and slavery.  Later they supported female suffrage, Prohibition and disarmament.  Today they are against torture, tobacco and trans fats.

These are the cats, Joe, who really believe that the state is here to make us Do Right.  These are the university professors and academic bureaucrats who believe in suppressing free speech in the name of polite discourse — just as they did 100 years ago when dirty books were banned in Boston.  These are the folks who want to write long ‘codes of conduct’ to regulate sexual encounters among undergraduates in the name of feminism — which again is pretty much what they were doing when Victoria was queen.  These folks want a strong national government because they deeply, truly and instinctively believe that true freedom means doing right, and that a government that makes people behave right makes them more free.

But here’s the catch: government has to be pure before it can make us pure.  You can’t have crooks and thieves and urban political machines imposing their wretched notions of patronage and compromise on that great engine of moral uplift, the federal government.  You can’t have lobbyists making laws if the purpose of the laws is to make us all pure — so you can’t have congressmen who are in hock to them or who take their favors.  Like Caesar’s wife, the federal government must be above suspicion.

Ideally, it sometimes seems as if the goo-goos would like to take the politics out of government and replace the messy give and take favor-swapping of conventional politics with the pure and glorious work of administration.  They would like the United States to have the City Manager form of government and replace the political hacks with degreed and credentialed experts in all the requisite fields.

It’s an old and honorable part of the American political tradition and without these earnest reformers we’d sink even deeper in the swamp than we already are — but like all the rest of the crazed ideological pressure groups and narrow interests that make up our body politic they’d ruin the country if they ever got full control.

But you can’t ask a goo-goo to stop being a goo-goo anymore than you can stop Charlie Rangel from liking the high life.

The fight between the reformers and the pols is likely to be a destructive one for the Democrats, and the racial dimension will only make things worse.  New York Democratic politics have been roiled for years by the struggles of different racial groups for high profile posts and the spoils of office.  In the last two weeks three high profile African-American Democrats have been rejected by the party: David Paterson, Charles Rangel and Harold Ford.  All three had their flaws, but then so do many of the white politicians who enjoy the privileges of power undisturbed in this great country of ours.  President Obama, the only national figure who effectively bridges this growing divide in the Democratic coalition, will probably have to keep intervening to hold the New York party together, but the defenestration of Rangel, the looming replacement of David Paterson by über white-boy candidate Andrew Cuomo and the rejection of Harold Ford in favor of the weak Kirsten Gillibrand will not soon be forgotten.

There have been two eras of close cooperation between blacks and goo-goos in American history.  The first started with the abolitionist movement and culminated in Reconstruction in a joint effort to establish black rights in the South.  That alliance broke up, in part because of goo-goo disgust at the real and perceived corruption of the Reconstruction governments in the south.  The second era took shape in the 1930s and reached its apogee during the civil rights movement.  It’s still too soon to tell, but we could be looking at a second break-up now.  While blacks continued to vote Republican after 1876 (where they were still allowed to vote), black politicians mostly gave up on the goo-goos when Reconstruction died and the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ of the southern delegations to Republican conventions often voted with cynical pragmatism for machine pols rather than reformers.

These days there is a new factor: the rise of a new generation of well educated, well connected African American politicians (like President Obama or Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker) whose base transcends race.  The contest for the loyalty of poor and lower-middle class African-Americans between the crusty old pols and the shiny new reformers is going to be one of the great epic stories that make American politics so interesting.  But whatever comes out of all this, the struggles between goo-goos and  hacks are likely to test the unity and strength of the Democratic coalition for some years to come.