Power is a heady potion

At 11 a.m. Tuesday in downtown Raleigh, you could get two radically different pictures of your government at work.

In the 1840 state Capitol, lawmakers gathered for Gov. Mike Easley to sign a budget bill with a lot of new money to help educate our children.

Three blocks south in the 1970 Wake County Court House, former House Speaker Jim Black was sentenced to prison on corruption charges.

You can think of it as old virtues versus new sleazy, big-money politics.

Which view of the legislature is correct -- working to give our children a better life? Or oiling the political machine?

Judge Donald Stephens put it starkly after listening to Black: "We got to look into the window of politics, and the view from this window is rather unsavory."

Black painted a very dark portrait of the way the legislature works. Never before in North Carolina history had such a powerful politician taken the stand and testified for several hours on all forms of skulduggery.

The state's top lobbyist, Don Beason, lent him $500,000. Black said lobbyists' lending money to legislators, was "usual and customary."

Black talked about cutting a deal with Republican Rep. Michael Decker in 1997 -- five years before he finally got Decker to switch parties. But the talks didn't get far because Black feared that Decker was wearing a wire.

Another Republican legislator, Black reported, was fishing for $300,000 to be paid into his children's trust account for his key vote for speaker.

Black said he gave $10,000 to Decker because he felt sorry for him. He said Decker was so poor he was sleeping in his truck and taking sponge baths in the legislative bathroom while in Raleigh. He said he also gave $8,000 to Rep. Alex Warner when he was having business problems.

Black said he took illegal cash payments not only from chiropractors but also from the owner of some topless joints in Charlotte.

The underlying message? They all do it. I just got caught.

"You and I know there are all kinds of shenanigans that go on in money and politics," Black said.

He has a point. Political money comes in under the door, over the transom and through the keyhole. Money is laundered, bundled and, as we now know, handed out in an IHOP bathroom.

Black, a man who loved the legislature, had, as Judge Stephens put it, placed a "defacing stain" on that institution.

So which is the true picture of the legislature -- the one on view in the Capitol or the one in a Wake County courtroom?

The answer, of course, is both. The legislature is made up of 170 men and women who represent a pretty fair cross section of North Carolina. It contains saints and sinners, bright people and dullards, hard workers and slackers.

As a group, they are no better or worse than the people in your church or civic club.

In the end, I do not believe that even Jim Black is fundamentally a corrupt man. There is no evidence that he enriched himself at public expense. The money was used to stay in power.

"Power is a heady wine," the judge said. "It intoxicates the church deacon as much as it does the thief."