After keeping a low profile for most of election season, pro-casino forces sprang into gear, rolling out a bevy of TV ads. In an attempt to neutral 
potential hostility downstate, one commercial points out that New York City‘s two mayor candidates, Bill de Blasio (D) and Joe Lhota (R, left) both favor gambling expansion. Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) continues to distance himself from the campaign, “taking an extremely quiet stance,” as the Buffalo News puts it. When confronted on it, he said, “You can’t be any more linked to it than I am.” Good on you, guv, but it would be better if you didn’t have to be practically coerced into giving public statements of support. But, as he said, “This is about television commercials. This is about direct mailings, and that’s how this campaign is going to be run and won or lost.” Opponents are financially outgunned by are hitting back hard with anecdotal evidence of rampant pathological gambling and overstated economic benefits.
And in the newspaper pages. That gray eminence, The New York Times, weighed in this week with a predictably anti-casino editorial. Its arguments were so rote that the author could have penned them in his sleep. Legalized casinos are bad economic policy was the editorial’s case, using some dire Atlantic City statistics to bolster its assertion that casinos had produced “mostly dismal” results in other cities. (Funny, but they’re Detroit‘s strongest source of tax revenue.)
“[C]asino visitors rarely spend their money outside the resort,” grumbled the Times. So? It’s still money spent in the local tax base. You want it should be spent in Pennsylvania instead? “The casino construction jobs are not permanent,” runs another argument, one that doesn’t even pass the laugh test. If the NYT had its way, casinos would be illegal — or at least confined to distant areas of the state where they are “unlikely to cause much harm.” To borrow a Chinese saying, the Times has wind in its sleeves. We’ll find out on Nov. 5 if anybody was won over by its anti-gambling song and dance.
If Illinois’ casinos were hoping for regulatory relief from state regulators, they didn’t get it. Instead of operating 22 hours a day, they wanted to go to ’round-the-clock gambling. No dice, said the Illinois Gaming Board. Giving the financially besieged casinos an extra two hours would have been the least the IGB could have done. After all, many slot routes in the state are accessible all day and night. What do Illinois casinos have to do to catch a break?
Speaking of those slot routes, they’re the focus of an emerging scandal. Bars and slot providers have been engaged in a legal but ethically questionable dances. Joe Schmo, bar operator, pays unlicensed machine supplier Joe Dokes for X number of machines. Dokes, in turns, sublets the contract to licensed provider Joe Blow, in return for a sizable kickback. It’s as seamy as all get-out but, at this point, Illinois can’t do much more than close the barn door after the horse has bolted.
