As an almost 25 year resident of Charlotte, I’ve been on the lookout for the inevitable  cultural changes that would come with iron-clad Democrat control of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. Part of the tax and spend culture that inevitably develops with liberal control of a place, particularly a decent sized to large sized city, is a sort of nepotism between the political funders of the liberal welfare state and the liberal welfare state itself (by which I mean government agencies and nonprofits.)

Harold Ca$h Cogdell, power broker and Commi$$ion Chairman

Basically, one stuffs the pockets of the other in endless rounds of quid pro quo. This pocket lining is such an accepted part of political liberal culture in cities that liberals dominate that little is thought of it morally. It’s just the norm.

This is why Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich is headed to prison for 14 years — just like the governor before him, who is serving a nearly seven year prison sentence. This is why that state has sent a governor a decade to prison for the last four decades. Back of the envelope, that’s a roughly 40 percent incarceration rate for the position. But in that culture, the kind of wheeling and dealing where you scrape a percentage off the top for yourself is expected and accepted, no matter what the law says.

Which makes Mecklenburg County Commission Chairman Harold Cogdell’s “job” at the C.W. Williams Community Health Center all the more interesting. As the Charlotte Observer reported this morning, Cogdell was able to get the non-profit health care provider an extra $110,000 in funding during budgeting in June, a feat considering what a tough budget year it was and the fact that the county manager, who has been known to roll and dole himself to politically connected organizations, originally recommended that the group only get $280,000 rather than the $390,000 it eventually got thanks to Cogdell’s lobbying.

Now here’s the interesting part. The funding change was appoved in June in a straight party line vote, 6-3, thanks to Cogdell’s lobbying. Two months later, in August, as the Observer reports, Cogdell went to work for C.W. Williams Community Health Center as their attorney and won’t say how much he gets paid.

The job began in August. Yet none of the Democrats on the county commission raised any questions publicly about the funding increase they all voted for and the coincidental job offering until almost four months later, when they decided they were steamed at Cogdell for using four GOP votes plus his own to vote himself chairman of the commission, ousting longtime Democrat chairwoman Jennifer Roberts.

But the ruling Dems were perfectly happy with the job quid pro quo arrangement, one made possible only through their votes, before that. There was no apparent anger at having been used or anything like that. That’s because this is the way they roll.

And it is the way liberal Democrat politics works in big cities and in the inevitably more corrupt environment it fosters.

 (Cogdell has since been accused of being a Republican. Let me assure you, he’s not. The guy is about as blue as they come.)

Don’t get me wrong. The GOP can be corrupt when in power, too. There’s no doubt about that. But conservative political cultures generally lack that quid-pro-quo-from-government-institutions expectation because they are geared toward decreasing the size of government, rather than seeing government as a redistribution mechanism that owes them and everyone else a slice.

Cogdell’s job-for-funding scheme is just another one of the subtle signs of the growth and inevitable acceptance of that culture here. There’s more to come, I’m sure.

 Bonus Observation: Note the local media’s lack of interest in investigating this until after Cogdell betrayed the Democrat power structure. I’m just saying.