Rolling the Dice with McCain and Online Gambling

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.

John McCain’s Gambling Problem: Team May Have Ties to Gambling Industry

As the online gambling industry fights to gain its legal stature in the United States through a challenge waged by the The Interactive Media Entertainment & Gaming Association, the New York Times has hit the stands with a story that McCain may have ties to the land-based casino sector.

A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table, according to the New York Times. He was throwing dice one night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain – that would be Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut.

The visit had been arranged by the lobbyist, Scott Reed, who works for the Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe that has contributed heavily to Mr. McCain’s campaigns and built Foxwoods into the world’s second-largest casino. Joining them was Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s current campaign manager. Their night of good fortune epitomized not just Mr. McCain’s affection for gambling, but also the close relationship he has built with the gambling industry and its lobbyists during his 25-year career in Congress.

As a two-time chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, Mr. McCain has done more than any other member of Congress to shape the laws governing America’s casinos, helping to transform the once-sleepy Indian gambling business into a $26-billion-a-year behemoth with 423 casinos across the country. He has won praise as a champion of economic development and self-governance on reservations.

“One of the founding fathers of Indian gaming” is what Steven Light, a University of North Dakota professor and a leading Indian gambling expert, called Mr. McCain.

As factions of the ferociously competitive gambling industry have vied for an edge, they have found it advantageous to cultivate a relationship with Mr. McCain or hire someone who has one, according to an examination based on more than 70 interviews and thousands of pages of documents.

The Indian casinos have not exactly embraced the online gambling sector, however, though McCain has gone on record as saying that prohibition of Internet gambling and online poker is not a priority of his.

“It is really Sen. Jon Kyl’s deal,” McCain told a Las Vegas reporter when pressed about the subject. Arizona Republican Senator Jon Kyl was a co-author of recently past Internet gambling prohibition – the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act – and has been among the industry’s most aggressive foes over the past decade. Strangely, Kyl has not taken center stage on the issue in recent months at a time when bills have been presented in the House by Democratic Congressman Barney Frank. Fellow Republican Spencer Bacchus has taken the lead in his place.

But McCain insists online gambling prohibition is far from his mind.

“I haven’t thought about the issue,” McCain said when pressed further by the Vegas-based reporter.

The Indian casinos, like Las Vegas, have been casting a keen eye on the multi billion dollar Internet gambling sector. Vegas has profited from the industry indirectly via the World Series of Poker, which draws throngs of players to Sin City during its hottest months of summer. The online poker rooms have been credited for building the WSOP.

And the Indians have not been left out of the equation. Kahnawake, a tribe outside of Quebec, Canada, is among the most prominent enterprises involved in online gambling today, overseeing such businesses as BodogLife.com and UltimateBet Poker.

The New York Times questions McCain’s classification as a “maverick” based on his relationship with the Indian casinos and those lobbyists who represent them.

Mr. McCain portrays himself as a Washington maverick unswayed by special interests, referring recently to lobbyists as “birds of prey.” Yet in his current campaign, more than 40 fund-raisers and top advisers have lobbied or worked for an array of gambling interests – including tribal and Las Vegas casinos, lottery companies and online poker purveyors.

Mr. McCain declined to be interviewed by the New York Times. In written answers to questions, his campaign staff said he was “justifiably proud” of his record on regulating Indian gambling. “Senator McCain has taken positions on policy issues because he believed they are in the public interest,” the campaign said.

Just two weeks ago, Democratic running mate Joe Biden announced that his son would no longer engage in lobbying efforts. Biden’s son, Hunter, worked on lobbying efforts for the online poker sector.

Federal lobbying records show that Hunter Biden’s firm was hired in June by lawyers for J. Russell DeLeon and his wife, Ruth Parasol, billionaire expatriates who founded a Web site called PartyPoker, according to a New York Times report. Their company, PartyGaming P.L.C., which later went public in London and was the single largest IPO on the London Stock Exchange in 2004, stopped doing business in the United States after President Bush signed a bill into law in 2006 aimed at curbing online gambling.

Wyeth Wiedeman, a lobbyist hired by Mr. DeLeon and Ms. Parasol, said Mr. Biden helped put together a lobbying campaign to persuade Congress to pass a law that would clarify the question about whether online gambling was legal prior to 2006. Mr. Wiedeman said the Justice Department has been examining the couple and others involved with the PartyPoker site.

PartyPoker was forced out of the US market thanks to Jon Kyl’s co-authored UIGEA. At the time, 80 percent of Party’s customers were originating from the US. And in an ironic twist, one time Iowa Republican Congressman and another co-author of the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act, Jim Leach, is now vocally endorsing Democratic Senator Barack Obama for President.