Clinton’s Gambling Panel Will Lack Bite

Wed., Jan. 29, 1997

William Safire New York Times

Did you bet on the Super Bowl? If you did, you knew the point spread - the expected difference, touted in the media as a service to gamblers - before you put down your money.

A private bet with friends is your own business. But for four years, a federal law has been on the books to prohibit states from making lotteries or other gambling schemes dependent on the outcome of sports contests.

The reason is simple: gambling corrupts. That’s why NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue fought hard for that law to protect professional football from gambling’s inexorable fixers. And it’s why the NFL wants President Clinton to appoint a savvy former athlete (like Roger Staubach or Jack Kemp) to the national commission just set up by Congress to investigate the impact of gambling in America.

The lobby for the evil industry that turns over a half-trillion dollars every year claims that legal gambling merely substitutes for illegal gambling, thereby letting the public in on the profit to support education and all good things.

What an absurdity. State-advertised lotteries and state-approved casinos add to, rather than replace, gamblers’ operations. An illicit bookie, with no cut to give the state, can give higher odds than those offered by the taxpaying “gaming industry”; moreover, high rollers who collected $10,000 from their bookie on Sunday’s Super Bowl don’t share their winnings with the tax collector. State-sponsored gambling gives moral sanction and fresh impetus to bookies, numbers racketeers - and the Mafia.

Voters across the nation are awakening to the scam perpetrated on them by the gamblers’ lobby and the politicians in its pocket.

In New York, politicians who thought a pro-casino bill would slip through are stunned by the ferocity of grass-roots opposition.

In Louisiana, casino interests spread millions in last-minute walkin’-around money on the streets of New Orleans to snatch an election for Democrat Mary Landrieu, who may now join Nevada’s Richard Bryan as the U.S. Senate’s defender of “gaming entertainment.” (If glitzy casinos are such fun, why is Nevada’s suicide rate the nation’s worst?)

In Maryland, the state Democratic Party - home of liberal Sens. Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski - is now trying to ram through a law bringing slot machines to racetracks. If the “taxplayers” succeed in overriding the gutsy Republican governor’s opposition, Marylanders will slide down the crapshooters’ slippery slope, and home computers will become slots for tots.

With local Democratic regimes in the lead for succumbing to gambling interests, you might think Republicans would take the lead in making this a defining values issue.

But that prospect was kicked in the head first by Bob Dole’s acceptance of $500,000 from the Las Vegas crowd, and more recently the dismaying dive taken by Newt Gingrich, who used his speaker’s appointment to the commission to name a top Vegas casino boss.

Assume that House democratic leader Dick Gephardt follows Newt’s example by choosing the sweetheart labor leader being pressed on him by the casino lobby. That would leave the salvation of the gambling study in the hands of Bill Clinton, who has three picks out of the nine.

Will the president appoint a trio to illuminate the truth about gambling’s false promises and regressive taxation? Will he act to protect compulsive gamblers from a life of crime?

Don’t count on it. Now in the final stages of being vetted in the White House are (1) a member of the gaming-regulating bureaucracy dependent on keeping an industry to regulate (2) a Minnesota Native-American likely to be manipulated by the billion-dollar tribe of Croupier Indians and (3) a split-the-difference think-tanker.

No anti-gambling Democrats like Paul Simon or Bill Bradley; no moralist Native-American like the newly elected head of New York’s Seneca tribe; nobody the gamblers’ lobby is worried about.

Brace yourselves for the painless-taxation shell game. Those croupiers in black tie? Hard-working union members caring for families. Those shills in net stockings serving drinks to suckers? Mothers striving to stay off welfare. Casino owners ripping off $45 billion a year in profits? Upright small investors and pension funds.

Don’t be fooled. Gambling corrupts. The Super Bowl Monday-morning quarterbacks should watch who appoints whom to the commission, and how much the kickback will be.

xxxx

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