Those supporters include Victoria Loe Hicks, whose columns are a regular feature of these pages. Ms. Hicks is a veteran Dallas writer who is smart and well-educated, but she made up her mind on the Blackwood issue long ago, even before meeting with representatives of the Coalition for Open Government, which is opposing the Blackwood strong-mayor proposal.

I am not sure what Ms. Hicks' agenda is, but her stance on the Blackwood issue only serves the purposes of the power elite who are backing Mayor Laura Miller and attorney Beth Ann Blackwood in their efforts to take decision-making behind closed doors as it was in the bad old days.

While the Blackwood document is flawed in many ways, its most egregious error is to bury its head in the sand when it comes to the real-world currency of political power.

The reality is this: When one politician controls the budget, board appointments and the hiring and firing of not only the major city employees but also all 13,000 city workers, plus contracts and venues, then that politician will be able to play each of these against the other. Council members will be played one against the other. Appointments will be played against budget support. Businesses will be played, ethnic groups will be played.

It's not that a decent mayor of Dallas will wake up one morning and suddenly become Boss Tweed or that Dallas City Hall will suddenly become corrupt from top to bottom. One of the truest things ever said is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Notice that it does not say that power corrupts overnight. It is a process through which a savvy politician learns how to use his or her strengths to exploit the weaknesses of others, whether those others are systems, budgets, laws or people.

This is the reality of the Blackwood proposal that no one is talking about. Forget the comparisons on paper and look into the harsh reality of the magnitude of power the mayor of Dallas will have under it.

For example, the mayor will be able to hire and fire the city attorney. In a perfect world, the city attorney would be a person of such integrity that the attorney's legal rulings would never be compromised.

But this is not a perfect world. In the real world of the Blackwood charter, the mayor calls the city attorney in and asks for an opinion on a controversial matter that could be detrimental to the mayor. The city attorney has a spouse with a serious illness and the medical bills are piling up, plus the kids are in private schools.

The mayor knows all this. They both know that the mayor can fire the attorney on a moment's notice. In such a situation, which happens every day in the real world of both politics and business, compromises are made. In this situation, the compromise in the legal ruling affects the city of Dallas, its citizens, its coffers and its reputation.

Let me provide another example. The mayor calls a council member and introduces him to a business owner who wants a city contract. The mayor doesn't shake down the business owner for cash for his or her own pockets. Instead, the mayor directs the owner to contribute to the council member's campaign, meaning they are both indebted to the mayor.

Politics is about power and reality. The Blackwood charter fails at balancing those two, and it is time the citizens of Dallas saw this proposal for what it is ? a flawed document that sets in place an imperfect system that can easily be exploited by imperfect human beings.

All of us are imperfect, and that includes Victoria Loe Hicks and me.

David Marquis is a writer and activist who serves as the media relations coordinator for the Coalition for Open Government.