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From the NY Times:

David A Paterson was the great hope of Harlem’s Gang of Four. He was the instrument by which an extraordinary political quartet nurtured since professional infancy by the legendary Democratic leader J. Raymond Jones would impart their legacy to a younger generation of New York politicians.

That hope died with a thud on Friday.

David Paterson’s fall personifies something more than the end of a decades-old Democratic dynasty. It signifies the passing of the Old Guard in black politics in New York and other cities. Neighborhoods have changed. Black voters have dispersed. And politics has evolved into a less racial, if not quite a post-racial, period.

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Just a week ago, as McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” blared from loudspeakers, Mr. Paterson formally declared his candidacy for a full four-year term as governor, an office he ascended to by a fluke in 2008. But, on Friday, with his campaign hobbled by a meager war chest and historically low popularity ratings, he announced that he was giving up the race. What finally drove him from the campaign were allegations reported in The New York Times that he and his State Police intervened in a domestic-abuse case involving one of his top aides.

Those allegations, by coincidence, were reported on the same day that a Congressional ethics committee admonished one of Mr. Paterson’s mentors, Representative Charles B. Rangel, the only member of the Gang of Four still in office, for accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean. Still pending are the ethics panel’s verdict on more serious questions involving his fund-raising, failure to pay federal taxes on rental income from a Dominican villa and his use of four rent-stabilized apartments provided by a Manhattan real estate developer.

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