When I was much younger, a mere pup, possessor of the sort of preternatural wisdom which in retrospect occasions much hilarity, I was acquainted with a fellow who had been a California State Assemblyman and had been run out of Sacramento for “misuse” of his state-leased vehicle.

I remember his name, but I’m not sure if I should use it here. He was not much older than I back then and therefore is probably still alive, so I’ll give him a fig leaf and call him KM. His career was short. And although time has a habit of warping events and memories are tricky things, I think I can recall with some accuracy the story he told me.

KM had been a star quarterback at U.C. Berkeley, a law school graduate. Bright, articulate, and full of ideals, he’d arrived at the state capitol loaded with ideas and eager to serve.

He hadn’t been there long when a committee on which he served had a contentious fight over a piece of legislation which KM supported; it passed narrowly. On the following day, he was visited in his offices by a well-dressed fellow he’d never seen before. The man brought with him an envelope which he placed on KM’s desk. The envelope contained a packet of hundred dollar bills.

KM informed the man that if he ever saw him again in his office he would call the police; he then threw the man and his envelope out the door.

Within 24 hours, KM later told me, “they were all talking about it on the floor” of the Assembly, and the talk was not meant to be complimentary. The lobbyist with the envelope had been astonished and had passed this astonishment on to others, and the general tenor of remarks among his colleagues had been that KM was foolish, naive, and not likely to last long.

Since he’d already been hit by a few linebackers, KM was not afraid of lobbyists. He might’ve done better, though, to worry about his fellow legislators.

People are on the take, you see. All kinds of people. Money is always available at the nexus of power on every level of a society, including ours, and state legislatures are especially awash in it. It greases the machinery. It produces careers. And anybody who makes trouble about it, especially anybody who is on the inside, attracts enemies.

It happened that KM’s marriage ran into some difficulty. His wife decided to go “back home” –– somewhere in the midwest, I think it was –– and planned to drive there. But she wanted to take some things with her, and the family’s only vehicle was a small sportscar.

KM had been driving a state-leased car, a universal practice which survives to this day. He mentioned his situation to a veteran Democratic legislator who suggested that KM’s wife borrow the state car for the drive; she’d pay for the gas and bring it straight back. You will not be surprised to learn that once KM’s wife left the state the local press had the story: KM was abusing the privilege of the car lease, cheating the taxpayers.

And that was the end of KM’s political career.

I relate this story not to defend KM, who indeed did something he ought not to have done, but to widen the context. The public disclosure of his ‘crime’, such as it was, managed not only to force him from office but to discredit any complaints he might make about institutional corruption in Sacramento.

One might well observe that if every politician in office were to be prosecuted for taking bribes, our prisons would be too full to house all of the pot smokers currently crowding them. Of course, we do not define campaign ‘contributions’ as bribes. When a pol gets an envelope stuffed with cash, it usually gets handed over to someone in charge of fund-raising. Lobbyists attend testimonial dinners where the beef is so expensive you’d think you were in Japan. Influence can be bought in a lot of ways: organizational support, media coverage, technical assistance.

See, the thing is actually an enormous gray area. Giving money to a political candidate is freedom of speech, the right to support someone or something you believe in. Nothing wrong in that. The pol, meanwhile, can easily rationalize it. He or she would’ve voted that way anyhow. If I wrote several checks (small, I grant you) to Barack Obama’s campaign, was I trying to bribe him? No question: I wanted something for it. Still do.

So how is that different, other than in size, from the huge sums flowing into the coffers from corporations or unions? These donors, too, want something for it. The big ones, it turns out, pretty much get what they pay for. Everybody knows how it works. The mainstream media know. The pols all know. The corporations and unions know. Anyone who wants to become an Ambassador knows. Bribery and extortion all over the place.

“The trick,” as former Governor Rod Blagojevich was overheard to say in one of his many wiretapped conversations with aides, “is how do you indirectly” negotiate one of those quid-pro-quos. “You gotta be careful how you express that,” he said at one point. At another: “I would do it in person. I would not do it on the phone.”

The trick, as the governor has by now learned, is that you do not do any of this stuff if you have attracted a lot of enemies. We are in an age of almost limitless surveillance, and he should have known that. There are different rules for those who piss off the wrong guys.

I’m reading the charges of the House Committee on which the Illinois legislature impeached and convicted Blagojevich, and I’m seeing nothing more amazing than business-as-usual. “Attempts to Trade Official Acts for Campaign Contributions” is one such section. Anyone recall the scene from ”Casablanca”where the cop is stunned to discover gambling at Rick’s?

The gist of this section, remarkably, describes the Governor’s efforts to step-up his fundraising before a new state law went into effect in 2009. The new law prohibited the governor from soliciting contributions from businesses which wanted state contracts.

Thing is, such contributions have continued to flow unimpeded into the campaigns of Illinois legislators. And when Blagojevich was hustling cash before the deadline it was not only legal but commonplace. In his case, however, captured on wiretaps, we’ve got his linking the signing of legislation redirecting funds from casinos to racetracks to the promise of funds from the racetrack guys and specifying that the money had to come in before January 1st.

The House committee then tied Blagojevich to Tony Rezko. You remember Tony. This is the guy who brought Barack Obama into a land deal which helped the future President financially.

Rezko, whose legal problems are well-known, is alleged to have been leaning on businesses and wealthy individuals in order to raise money for Blagojevich. But the facts, as they’ve been developed and as they are described in the House committee’s own recitation, show that Rezko was not operating on behalf of the eventual recipients but on his own; his conduct is consistent with that of a guy trying to buy himself favors with politicians by making himself useful as a fund-raiser.

There are several other matters itemized by the committee, each indicating some form of shakedown. The governor trying to squeeze money from high-rollers who would benefit from his signing legislation. Absent is any discussion of whether these same high-rollers managed to feed any cash to the campaign treasuries of the legislators who pushed the bills. In that eloquent silence, we are invited to buy the fantasy that this did not happen.

None of this morally acquits Blagojevich. I make no case for his purity of motive or honorable behavior. I simply ask: what made him so special? There are forty-nine other states with governors. Any bets out there on how many of them, albeit with more subtlety, do the same thing?

For these reasons, I am suspicious of the cover story. But it is still not clear to me what happened here. It’s possible that the Governor was caught inadvertently, either through another investigation where his name kept popping up, or by an informant, or by happenstance. Pols tend toward arrogance anyhow. They can get nailed by accident. But maybe something else.

The central role of Patrick Fitzgerald, as I’ve written earlier, does not reassure me.

It is a fact that sometimes when cops bust a ‘major drug trafficker’, the real beneficiary of the arrest is the trafficker’s competition. Investigations and prosecutions may serve purposes beyond those on the surface. That doesn’t mean that the target is innocent; but when the target is someone whose conduct is quite ordinary in politics, and when the target has become a problem to powerful people, then we ought to consider whether there are motives not mentioned on television.

Interestingly, there are hints of ulterior motives in the Illinois House committee Report. We’ll take a look at them next.