As West Warwick Rep. Tim Williamson continues to flog the twice-shot casino horse here in Rhode Island, an editorial by Thomas Grey–national field director of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling–in today’s ProJo points out that the recent Abramoff scandal occurred because of influence peddling done by Indian casinos. Thus, the unsurprising conclusion is that–in addition to financial and social costs–gambling leads to political corruption.

Both political parties have been equal-opportunity pigs at the feeding trough of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Behind the recent confessions of mail fraud, tax evasion, and influence peddling is the enormous impact of gambling dollars on politics. Gambling lobbyists are involved in misused charities, campaign contributions, overseas golfing excursions, and stipends to the wives of lawmakers. Trace the money to its source and you find enormous gambling profits.
The majority of senators are returning tainted gambling contributions, including Conrad Burns (R.-Mont.), Byron Dorgan (D.-N.D.), Mitch McConnell (R.-Kty.), Harry Reid (D.-Nev.), Hillary Rodham Clinton (D.-N.Y.), Sam Brownback (R.-Kans.), and Max Baucus, (D.-Mont.) Prominent House members on the list of recipients include former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R.-Texas), Nita Lowey (D.-N.Y.), House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R.-Ill.), Earl Pomeroy (D.-N.D.), Bob Ney (R.-Ohio), and Patrick Kennedy (D.-R.I.).
Elected officials of both parties are now giving back millions of gambling dollars with the same ease with which they accepted them.
Current headlines eclipse the savings-and-loan scandals of a generation ago. Congress tried to bail out the financial losses of savings-and-loan associations, but who pays for the victims of our national gambling binge, the losses resulting from increased addictions, bankruptcies, theft, embezzlements, suicides, marital problems, and broken homes?
Certainly not the gambling promoters and their hirelings.

It’s a link I wish I’d made myself within the context of the latest stab at a RI casino. I’ve said before that it is the RI government that is most addicted to gambling because of the revenue generated, but Grey sums it up nicely:

The tragedy of gambling is the lure of great wealth, painlessly acquired through luck. When individuals become addicted to this dream of easy money, their greed often leads to fraud, bankruptcy, and personal tragedy.
This same pattern is emerging in modern government. Here, too, gamblers offer easy wealth: a painless revenue stream to cover government deficits. With the lubrication of political contributions, lawmakers view gambling as the solution to financing government obligations. Thus, Government slowly becomes addicted to more and more gambling schemes.
The results are tragically predictable: financial shortfalls, personal tragedies, and the political corruption that we are now experiencing. No state can gamble itself rich.
Last year, Nevada passed the largest tax increase in its history. Like other gambling-addicted states, Nevada had to get out of the hole that gambling had dug for it. The time has come for politicians to sever their ties with gambling predators.

Is this the sort of financial “security” we are seeking? I support the idea that RIers should have the right to vote on whether or not they want a casino. But I’ll also continue to argue against the false promise of painless revenue that the casino-pushers proffer. Such a scheme just doesn’t square with my old-fashioned Yankee sensibility.

First things first: I’m not a big proponent of state-sponsored gambling. I understand it can be fun for the participant, but I think that the revenue generated by gambling proceeds give a false sense of security to our politicians. Have a potential revenue shortfall? Let’s not cut spending, let’s increase gambling! We can argue over whether or not gambling is addictive to individuals: what is certain is that it is most addictive to government.
With that being said, I don’t mind the idea of letting the people vote on whether or not they want a casino. But first, a privately operated casino (instead of state-run) needs to be deemed constitutional. The State Supreme Court has said it isn’t–twice. Thus, we now have a push for a Constitutional Amendment. But instead of writing a clean, concise line or two saying something like, oh, I don’t know….”gambling does not have to be state-operated”, we have this:

“Approval of this amendment to the state Constitution will authorize a casino gaming facility in the town of West Warwick, to be privately owned and operated in association with the Narragansett Indian Tribe, with tax proceeds from the casino being dedicated to property-tax relief for Rhode Island citizens, and will permit future privately owned and operated casino gaming facilities in this state only upon further vote of the people.”

Where’s the part that says only Del’s Lemonade and Saugy’s weiners can be served at the establishment? Such specificity is not the way to write a Constitutional Amendment. I’m not the only one who thinks so:

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Representative Bruce Long’s discomfort when the U.S. Senate primary race came up during his East Bay GOP Breakfast introduction of Mayor Steve Laffey spoke volumes. It might go too far to speculate about an underlying fear that a primary will alert Rhode Islanders to the fact that they have erroneously elected a Republican. Whatever the case, the idea that somebody within the party would challenge a Republican incumbent apparently requires explanation of the appropriate response.
The Laffey campaign seems to have recognized that need and has — wisely — left expression of the magnitude of its rebellion to the pages of the Wall Street Journal, for example. From the candidate, himself, the message is that “it’s just a race,” as he put it during his breakfast speech. Laffey appears, also, to have made a conscious effort to use the more-inclusive and better-sounding “we” (as in “we had a message”) — although the effort at times seemed so conscious as to be humorous (“a combination of me… and us!”).
But this is all strategic analysis. The bottom line is that Laffey is undeniably compelling on personal and rhetorical levels — eliciting, for inconsequential example, smiles across the tables when he patted his daughter’s head with a “hey beautiful” as she strode nonchalantly between him and his audience. It was even endearing in a regular-guy way when he cited Animal House mistakenly in place of Animal Farm (an error sure to attract the attention of Jonah Goldberg conservatives everywhere).
Ultimately, though, the reminder of these qualities finally helped me to give form to my doubts about Laffey’s campaign for U.S. Senate. The tremendous integrity that he rightly trumpets in his political biography — dropping everything and running for mayor to save his hometown from corruption and poor government — is the stuff of primetime dramas. It does not, however, translate immediately into compelling motivation to become a Senator. The need to make that translation is obviously on Laffey’s mind, but to my mind he does not manage the accomplishment.
“I see the American Dream dying across America” explains neither the vantage point from which he made the observation nor the reason that he individually can do more to remedy the problem from Congress rather than (at least at first) within the local and state government. I’d suggest that the people of Mississippi and California would be better able to save their own American Dreams than would a Rhode Islander reaching out to those states through the federal legislature.
The more pragmatic argument that Laffey makes on this count is that the RI GOP needs a “strong leader at the top of the ticket,” to cause not only votes, but participation and recruitment, as well, to trickle down. During his speech, Laffey pulled out a few pages of a table tracking registered voter trends by town and, probably correctly, took credit for Republican advances in his city of Cranston. It isn’t at all clear, however, that a Washington politician would have that effect; indeed, if strengthening the party locally is among Laffey’s goals, staying local for a while would seem more likely to achieve it. (I hope the mayor would agree that people change their political affiliation not on the sheepish basis of admiration for the guy at the top of the list, but because they have seen his policies put into action in their own towns.)
Bill Harsch is correct that Rhode Island must begin electing state and local officials who will redefine their positions to be useful, rather than honorary and beholden to established powers. I believe that Steve Laffey had unimpeachable motives to improve the town that raised him. I believe that he’s brazen and compelling enough to force similar improvements on the state surrounding that town.
Perhaps the most astute observation that Laffey made during his speech was that opponents of the policies that he espouses “view the world as a static thing.” From the economy to energy usage to cultural changes, the world is not static, but ever shifting. The same is true of public offices and their places in the government dynamic. If Laffey were to play a prominent role in redefining the Rhode Island system as an irrefutably representative one — a prosperous and irrefutably representative one — his motivation for further advancement would require no translation, and the in-party discomfort would belong to those who are afraid less of the disruption that comes with disagreement than of the success of the other side.

Although I smirked at the bit-too-genuine surprise that he expressed regarding the credibility with which Anchor Rising is treated, I left the East Bay GOP Breakfast impressed with Bill Harsch. In constructing his message as he campaigns to become Rhode Island’s attorney general, Harsch has hit upon the core idea that Rhode Islanders need to — and can be led to — understand: “This office is being wasted.”
He was speaking, of course, of the office that he would like to hold, but one could substitute just about any position in Rhode Island government without diminishing the potency of the complaint. Those who occupy local and state government are servants; their offices are tools for self-governing, not merely honorary positions of privilege, and returning them to usefulness would serve as an unlegislated reform. A failure to act in accordance with this basic idea plagues Rhode Island politics — from the Democratic majority, through the Republican establishment, even tainting the RI GOP anti-establishment.
We can debate the degree to which this state’s public policies accurately reflect the views of its citizens, but it doesn’t take long observation of local politics to conclude that Rhode Island’s government is only nominally representative. Newcomers to the state are correct to lament “Rhode-apathy,” but that syndrome is ultimately a defensive response to the situation in which Rhode Islanders find themselves. The concentration of power in the hands of a few and the fact that, in Harsch’s words, “these people [i.e., insiders] don’t embarrass,” lead us to “feeling shut out.”
It is here that the officials-as-tools message should resonate. The structure of representative democracy in general and a few specific offices (such as attorney general) exist for the purpose of propping open doors through which the average person hasn’t the standing even to draw response when knocking. We don’t have to disrupt our lives in rebellion; we merely have to elect candidates who will use their offices toward the ends that they legitimately serve (fighting, if necessary, to fortify their authority). Among the ends that Harsch would like to pursue, for example, is the scuttling of “cosy insider deals” and monopolies run by companies with no embedded interest in the state.
Few among those who live here would argue with Bill Harsch that Rhode Island “has enormous promise, and we’re being held back.” Looking at the lack of seriousness with which our representatives conduct themselves — whether they are writing in ex-presidents on their ballots, seeking creds with the common man by admitting to having never actually worked, or trawling comic books for inspirational public plaques — Rhode Islanders must acknowledge that none are more responsible for holding back our state than we, ourselves.

Sometimes I think that writers on social or political matters have an obligation not to participate in the processes or events of which they write. It is much more difficult, for example, to speak ill of a player whom one likes personally, or through whom one wishes to gain advantage. And surely both analysis and literary force suffer when cogent details become advisably withheld or generalized so as to avoid causing personal offense. (Note that I offer no specific examples.)
On the other hand, I wonder whether a writer can accurately understand topics such as politics without having first-hand experience of the emotional as well as intellectual forces involved. I can’t help but think, for example, that there are important lessons to be found in the relief that I felt upon discovering that the last two seats available at the East Bay GOP Breakfast were — although at a table being circumnavigated by Mayor Laffey as I sat — next to representatives of the Chafee campaign.
Lessons from that particular experience I’ll leave for further rumination, turning instead to those deriving from the presentation of the event’s host, Representative Bruce Long. As preface and intermissions to the speeches of the event’s two special guests, the soft-spoken Rep. Long offered, most prominently, a running back-slapping list of the elected officials and candidates present in the room. Such are the necessities of political life, but in a gathering of approximately seventy people, it made gratuitously conspicuous the high percentage of insiders. (Indeed, Mayor Laffey’s family alone contributed about 8% of the headcount.)
Perhaps by way of explanation for the copious recognition that he doled out, Rep. Long noted the lack of brave souls willing to enter Rhode Island politics on the side of the right (loosely speaking). With so many Republicans “afraid to be sacrificial lambs,” in Long’s words, a bit of ritualized encouragement of those who’ve stepped forward is certainly not too much to ask the rest of us to endure.
I would suggest, though, that obligatory clapping is less likely to encourage the lambs than would a clear enunciation of what, exactly, they are sacrificing for. Rep. Long may assert that Rhode Island’s Republican Party is in its current state of perpetual minority “not because of the issues,” but because of the aforementioned lack of people. Party chairwoman Patricia Morgan unintentionally contradicted him, however, when she stole five minutes at the end of the meeting to announce that the party is finally getting around to piecing together a platform.
It could be argued, I suppose, that the RI GOP’s difficulties couldn’t possibly be “because of the issues” when the group has yet to take any explicit stands on them. The hope and excitement fostered by the forceful speeches of attorney general candidate Bill Harsch and Mayor Laffey argue otherwise.