Rangel gets out the vote.

Congressman Charles B. Rangel championed the get out to vote effort when he addressed the October luncheon of the Associated Builders and Owners.

The Ranking Member of the House's powerful Ways & Means, Rangel said it was every member's patriotic duty to vote so that the hopes and dreams of their children could be fulfilled.

Rangel, chairman of the Board of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Dean of the New York State Congressional Delegation, inspired the gathering at the National Arts Club with his own true story of determination and hard work.

Raised on the streets of Lenox Avenue, the Bronx, Rangel dropped out of school, joined the military, and found himself in Korea almost captured by the Chinese. Upon his return from combat, he faced a dim future. "Being a high school drop out, I had no clue of what I wanted to do, or what I wanted to be, but I knew I had to get the hell out of the hole that I was in on Lenox Avenue," he told the ABO.

Rangel said he wanted to make his grandfather proud. He was an elevator operator in the criminal court building on 107th street, and although the younger Rangel was never encouraged to do so, he was inspired to become a lawyer and work in the very court building that employed his grandfather.

"When I went home and told my grandfather that I wanted to be a lawyer, he laughed all night long, but it worked out," Rangel said.

A graduate of New York University and St. John's University School of Law, Rangel said, "I really can't do enough for St. John's because it truly is a university that reached out for people whose parents never thought that they would be able to go to law school.

"The end of my grandfather's story is that I ended up being an assistant district attorney in the very same building where be was an elevator operator."

Now serving his 18th terms as the Representative for 15th Congressional District, Rangel is one of the most powerful and respected politicians in the nation. He is the principal author of the $5 billion Federal Empowerment Zone demonstration project to revitalize urban neighborhoods throughout America and the author of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which is responsible for financing 90% of the affordable housing built in the U.S. in the last ten years.

He spoke of the pride he took in working in Congress until the Democrats lost the majority and, he said, the entire Congress changed. "Today, one of the major problems that we have is that people have lost the ability to talk to each other, to be civil or to think in terms of compromise."

An opponent of the war in Iraq, Rangel said, "We are the advocate for the values of those who came before us, those who fought and died for us.

"Only in this country could a Charlie Rangel from Lenox Avenue become the chairman of the Ways and Means committee, a dream that people from other countries could never have. Don't you owe it to your children and your grandchildren, to be able to say when your nation was in trouble that you were not a Democrat, you were not a Republican, but you were a patriot?"