ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 24, 1996 TAG: 9611250063
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
THE GAMBLERS won a ballot initiative in Arizona, where voters called on the governor to sign a casino deal with Indian tribes - though he gutsily says he won't. And in Detroit, citizens fearful of losing business to a casino in Ontario voted to build a defensive one of their very own. That's two scores for the crapshooters.
But elsewhere across the country, the moral blight of organized, big-league casino and riverboat gambling - and the public disgrace of state-sponsored gambling - took a licking from people who have grown tired of being taken for suckers.
Despite more than $4 million spent by casino operators, gambling industry PAC's and unionized croupiers, the voters in 23 elections and referendums decisively defeated proposals to make the get-rich-quick philosophy their local way of life.
Experience has shown the promise of state-sponsored lotteries - that the proceeds would be used for more or better education - is a fraud. Money is fungible; when the state or city raises money ``painlessly,'' from public or private gambling, some of that money is ostentatiously set aside for schools - but legislators soon treat it as a replacement for funds previously voted for education.
Another reason for the gambling defeats is bipartisan shame. Liberals are ashamed of raising money regressively, preying on those who can least afford to lose. Conservatives are ashamed of allowing government actively to encourage an ancient vice and exploit a human weakness. Up to now, the nation's anti-gambling majority has been afflicted with ``pluralistic ignorance'' - not realizing it is a majority.
That's ending because rampant casino-ism in Las Vegas and Atlantic City is competing with the tax-avoiding palaces of glitz operated by real and phony Indian tribes, and their market appears to be reaching the saturation point.
The public is not as apathetic as cracked up to be at the spectacle of government promotion of moral degeneration. We're not talking here about a friendly evening of dollar-ante poker or a charity bingo game or office pool; we're dealing with a $40-billion-a-year predatory industry that deserves no official boost.
Thanks to Tom Grey and his National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, and to Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska and Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia, a national commission was set up this summer to study gambling's impact. The casino lobby, unable to weaken it, is now out to rig the nine-member commission with gambling enthusiasts.
Trent Lott resisted, picking a family-values type and an objective radiologist, but Newt Gingrich let down morality's side. Eager to help a Nevada freshman under union financial assault get re-elected, the speaker named the CEO of the MGM Grand casino company in Las Vegas, along with an unbiased academic.
Democrats may do worse. President Clinton is on the verge of appointing a Nevada gambling bureaucrat and a pro-casino Native American; his third pick may give the illusion of balance. Tom Grey suspects that Sen. Tom Daschle leans toward a South Dakota gambling commissioner and the House's Dick Gephardt is pledged to a union official representing casino employees, but both say they have not decided.
That would stack the commission in gambling's favor, guaranteeing a Pablum report and undermining the whole point of the exercise.
It's hard to believe the president is ready to go along with this. Such tilting of the table is in direct conflict with his family-values pitch; equally important, he no longer needs the soft money from casino interests for future campaigns. It would cost him nothing to do what is right.
Clinton's commission choices will determine whether we get the truth about gambling's impact on economies and its victim-customers - or get the sort of sleight-of-hand at which some gamblers are so adept.
- New York Times News Service
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB