This is Part I of a two-part column about political action and poker's future. Coming in Part II is a specific action plan for players and the industry.
My writing partner John Bond says he's a moderate, but the country has moved so far right that he looks liberal. He describes himself as a liberal-ish libertarian. From where I sit, he's a flaming left-winger, and hasn't liked any Republican since Teddy Roosevelt.
So, it surprised me when he called me and praised the choice of conservative former U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.) to lead the Poker Players Alliance's fight against governmental interference with poker.
The New York Times, in a recent article (March 5, 2007) about D'Amato, questioned the PPA's wisdom, given the Democrats control of Congress. But John notes that the most significant foes of poker are special business interests and faith-based moralists, and says D'Amato is particularly wellpositioned to woo them and the legislators who cater to them - or beat them over the head and do whatever it takes. D'Amato has a reputation for being a hard-knuckle scrapper who doesn't give up. He's a poker player, and loves the game. Like John, I'm pleased to have him as our frontman in the political tussle that lies ahead.
Poker's problems are a matter of politics rather than law. Many lawyers have pointed out that the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act) doesn't make online poker illegal, and none more lucidly than my
Card Player colleague Allyn Jaffrey Shulman. Nonetheless, the fact is that the UIGEA and various enforcement agencies have moved online sites and e-wallets like NETELLER from the U.S. market. Like the problem, the solution is political.
I wrote long ago that our industry must unite to fight governmental restriction of poker; I called for an association of players and industry to lobby against legislation affecting poker. My thinking - in part based on John's lobbying experience - was that you beat a bill in the drafting and negotiating stage, via access to the staffers who do the real grunt work of legislation. It's much easier to affect legislation before passage than to change it after passage. I suggested that the industry put up the bucks to lobby during drafting for an express exclusion of poker from any definition of gambling. Alas, that didn't happen. As is the case when a turn card comes that cripples but doesn't kill our hand, we must play on from the current situation, regardless of what happened before.
We need to approach our current situation like playing a hand, using tried-and-true strategies. What is our opponent thinking? What does he think we think he's thinking? What does he want us to do? How can we, by our decisions and actions, increase our chances of taking this pot?
Unfortunately, our biggest enemy doesn't have a face or a strategy to counteract - as it is inertia. It is easier for politicians to just leave things the way they are, not invest energy and effort into changing things, and not rock the boat. And poker's supporters have lives to live, and limited resources and energy to devote to this fight. We must induce action, and overcome this natural tendency toward inertia, which is not an easy task.
A subset of the inertia issue is that Democrats are well-served by the current situation. Whatever grass-roots political heat the UIGEA and other antipoker governmental actions generate burns Republicans. If the Democrats do nothing, they reap the political benefit of the poker community's outrage, without having to incur any political cost by changing things. This sad reality suggests that any strategy regarding federal legislation and regulation needs to be targeted at the 111th Congress in January 2009, after the 2008 elections, and perhaps a more accommodating attorney general.
But not all of our adversaries are faceless. Somebody lobbied then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to attach the UIGEA to the Safe Ports Act.
Who wants us shut down? Why? To beat them, we must know them. Just after passage of the UIGEA, Radley Balko wrote in Reason Magazine, "I think the main motivation for the bill was simply the moral aversion to gambling held by its chief sponsors - Goodlatte, Kyl, and Leach - and a desire to impose that moral rectitude on the rest of the country." (Oct. 26, 2006). Balko also points out that the anti-poker constituency goes beyond the self-righteous right, and includes, among others, clients of the nefarious and notorious Jack Abramoff, whose business interests compete for dollars that go (or went) to Internet poker. I agree that our adversaries are a strange-bedfellows alliance of those who want to tell us how to live and gambling-related business interests that compete with poker.
However, poker has its own constituency - the 70 million American poker players, including 23 million online players. Our adversaries have ignored that poker and politics have often gone together. Just look at the very incomplete list in this column of prominent American politicians who played poker. Indeed, one of the first poker rulebooks, Draw. Rules for Playing Poker, was written by U.S. Rep. Robert C. Schenck in 1880.
Besides identifying our adversaries, we must know our allies. A simple beginning in lobbying the feds for changes in laws, regulations, and Justice Department actions affecting poker is to identify who in power plays poker. We need a database of who among our 535 senators and congressmen is a player - in home games, public games, Internet games. And equally as valuable is who on their staffs plays. More business of government than you know is done by staffers. Come 2008, 80 or 90 congressional seats may be "in play" - meaning there's a chance for either party to win. We must identify those who might be pro-poker among incumbents and challengers, and wield what political muscle we can accordingly. The PPA and the industry will be doing this, but you can help. If you have knowledge of a congressman, senator, candidate, or staffer who has played poker, e-mail me the details:
[email protected]. I'll make sure that the info gets in the right hands. There may be a Harry Truman or Sam Rayburn in the bunch!
Roy Cooke has played more than 60,000 hours of pro poker and has been part of the I-poker industry since its beginnings. His longtime collaborator, John Bond, is a freelance writer in South Florida.
