EDITOR'S LETTER: Stop me before I predict
by James Rutherford
October 1, 2010
Who can say what will happen to online gaming legislation in Congress?
The indictment a couple weeks back of California state Sen. Rod Wright, a
champion of Internet gambling in its most important U.S. state, capped a month
in which supporters of legalization saw their hopes fall faster than President
Obama’s approval ratings.
That same week, the
office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced
that it had nailed a TARP bank in Arizona for providing clearing services for a
company that processes online gambling transactions, a practice that is illegal
in the United States. (The company in question had already agreed to forfeit to
the Justice Department a tidy $13 million.)
But the real bad news commenced with the results of a
Gallup poll released the first week of September in which the Republicans
scored their largest lead ever on the infamous question: “If the elections for Congress were being
held today, which party’s candidate would you vote for in your congressional
district?”
Mind you, the perjury and voter fraud charges Wright
faces, stemming from an allegation that he does not live in the district he
represents, aren’t likely to ruin the Los Angeles County Democrat, although
they will prove a distraction. On the other hand, if the GOP regains control of
the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate, too, which is what the
polls and prognosticators were telling us all through September, you can wave
goodbye to any chance that Web gambling will be regulated at the federal level
any time soon.
In the spirit of this electoral season let me offer a
prediction as to the precise day and hour when Barney Frank’s crusade for
federally regulated Internet gambling collides with Mother Earth’s cold, hard
bosom — 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on November 2, which is when the polls
will have closed west of the Rockies and millions of us will be staring blankly
at our TV sets, trying to process the realization that progressive government
in Washington may well be dead for a generation.
I should add that I’m lousy at
predictions.
If you’d asked me a year ago I’d have told you no way
that Obama, the Jackie Robinson of American political history, would fall from
grace as precipitously and inexplicably as he has, and that in the midst of
this historic recession an electorate apparently grown desperate for answers
would turn instead to the very guys who led us to the brink of economic
disaster. Yet here we stand, dazed it seems, the end of our American Century
drawing ever nearer even as the rhetoric of empire grows louder and more
hysterical, unable to find our way through the miasma of fear and hate that has
rendered the air of civic discourse all but unbreathable. But we’ve come to
define ourselves wholly in terms of consumption, haven’t we, and it’s made us
vacuous as a culture, and now with the triumph of the little screens (we
already had the endless chatter) perhaps we can be absolved for failing to
foresee how volatile things could get.
Me, I was thrown a few months ago when Frank finally
managed after three years to get his Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer
Protection and Enforcement Act out of his own House Financial Services
Committee — a feat which in hindsight may be even less impressive than I think
it is, but then who can say what the final days of a lame-duck Congress hold in
store. Frank certainly knows he may not have a committee after the first week
of January. And Democrats being Democrats they can get tangled up in
distractions of principle, which is about the only nice way to describe online
gambling.
Anyway, with the bill out there and the offshore
operators all stoked, it occurred to me that maybe I was wrong as usual, so I
asked Chris Krafcik, a St. Louis-based journalist and consultant who’s been
covering the Web gambling saga as closely as anyone, to look into it. His
findings, delivered with his customary detail and insight, are the subject of
this month’s cover story.
James Rutherford
is a New Jersey-based freelance writer.
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