With the November election right around the corner, Poker Player Newspaper asked journalist Amy Calistri to look at Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s candidacy from the perspective of their positions on gambling and poker. Amy’s piece on Senator McCain follows; her piece on Senator Obama will appear next issue]
“This is a very, very superstitious game,” he said. When his turn came to throw the dice, he picked them up and blew on them first. He had placed chips on the number 5, so (envisioning a combination of 2 and 3) he called, “Michael Jordan! Michael Jordan!”
In her May 2005 article in The New Yorker, Connie Bruck described John McCain’s love affair with craps, including a friend’s account of how he and McCain used to shoot craps for 14 hours straight in Vegas. When Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain puts his chips on the table, it is clear he likes to bet with the roller. But it is far less clear whether McCain will take the gambler’s side when it comes to online gambling.
With the financial sector teetering on collapse, rising unemployment, and military campaigns playing out on two fronts, it is understandable why neither presidential hopeful is featuring gambling as a defining issue of their candidacy. While understandable, it is also frustrating for the many internet poker players who define themselves as “one issue voters,” leaving them to search high and low for clues as to the candidates’ positions on internet gambling. And it may be especially challenging for those trying to pin down McCain, whose gambling policy clues cover the full spectrum, from pro to con.
The biggest McCain related internet gambling alarm bell is the 2008 Republican Platform, which is supposed to represent the cornerstone of the party’s agenda. It states, “Millions of Americans suffer from problem or pathological gambling that can destroy families. We support the law prohibiting gambling over the Internet.” The Poker Players Alliance (PPA) worked hard to convince the Republican Party to exclude such language, but to no avail. And just to prove the old adage that politics makes for strange bedfellows, former Senator Alfonse D’Amato and paid lobbyist for the PPA, currently endorses McCain.
PPA Executive Director John Pappas stated that McCain “does not have a specific position on Internet poker, but does appear to have been influenced by his fellow Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, who is a vigorous opponent of our rights. McCain, however, has always been willing to consider both sides of an issue and may simply need to know how strongly PPA members feel.” In what appears to be some rationalization for why their lobbyist would support a candidate whose party has a strong anti-internet gambling agenda, Pappas offered, “I can only hope that, should McCain be elected, we’d have some insight into his thought process. If you have someone that’s on the fence on your issue, then what better way to educate him than to surround him with people that understand the benefits of regulation, like D’Amato? We have a great open door to be able to engage him on the issue.”
Rationalization aside, Pappas’ assessment of McCain’s personal position on internet gambling appears to be correct; McCain doesn’t have one. In a recent interview, Las Vegas Review Journal’s reporter Erin Neff specifically asked McCain about his views on internet gambling. After a few false starts, and at one point trying to deflect the question by stating that internet gambling was Kyl’s issue, McCain finally answered: “Let me get back to you on it. I haven’t thought about the issue.” I suspect Neff is still waiting.
Actions always speak louder than words, but on this front McCain’s positions are also a bit murky. On one hand, McCain was a key architect of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act passed in 1988. McCain obviously believes that some forms of gambling can be safely regulated. But he clearly doesn’t feel that way about all forms of gambling.
In 2001, McCain introduced the Amateur Sports Integrity Act (S.718), a bill that would make it unlawful to wager on Olympic, college, and high school sports. In its final form the bill also included an amendment referred to as the “Unlawful Internet Gambling Funding Prohibition Act,” which read just like today’s UIGEA. It also proposed to cut off federal funding to any institution of higher learning that didn’t effectively monitor students’ funding of online gaming accounts. Granted, the anti-internet gambling amendments were not drafted by McCain, but it does indicate that at one point in his career, he was willing to throw internet gambling under the bus. Ultimately, the bill never made it to the floor.
There are no sure bets in politics or gambling. And looking to either presidential candidate to restore sanity to the legal conundrum of internet gambling in the U.S. may be a long shot. But at this point it time, it’s hard to even set the line on John McCain.
