The Smart Money on Casinos

Forget wind farms—somewhere six feet below the soil of Boston, the Puritans are spinning fast enough to power all of Massachusetts. They started twirling nearly a year ago when the Mashpee Wampanoag announced their casino dreams, and sped up in September when Governor Deval Patrick responded by floating his plan to license resort casinos in three regions of the state. Discussion has lulled in the past few months, but now, with a new legislative session upon us, the rpm’s of our buckle-shoed forefathers must be off the charts.

As Beacon Hill takes up the casino bill—and begins to replace last year’s many questions with answers—we can expect to see a domino effect of proposals and partnerships. Already the gambling industry’s billion-dollar giants are prepping their game plans as they descend on Boston, jostling for position to open the City on the Hill’s first, shining casino. And as the terrain comes into clearer focus, so do the true motives behind the combatants’ moves to date, as well as what they’ll need to do to ultimately prevail.

The Secret Genius of DiMasi’s Waiting Game

Speaker of the House Sal DiMasi, an avowed opponent of casinos, apparently misspoke when he told reporters in late October that he didn’t plan to consider gaming legislation until 2009. Clarifying that he actually meant 2008, he joked, “That was a Freudian slip.”

DiMasi’s famous reluctance to deal with Patrick’s casino proposal isn’t just about a moral aversion to slot machines. It’s also about power politics, and it has been all along. Back in late October, it was no coincidence that House leaders slapped together a hearing on gaming’s social ills the day after Patrick blasted the legislature for slow progress on his $1 billion life sciences initiative. The takeaway from the hearing wasn’t so much that people can get addicted to gambling (they can, but we already knew that). It was that the speaker is willing to use the divisive casino issue to hit back whenever Patrick takes a swing at him.

In dragging his feet on casinos, DiMasi has been plying that very brand of political judo: He knows that the grassroots liberals who swept Patrick into office in 2006 are the same people most reflexively opposed to casino gambling, which they see as just another way to shake out the pockets of the vulnerable to pay for a budget the rest of us can’t balance. The longer the debate goes on, then, the more it hurts Patrick. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Sal DiMasi’s motivation for the scheduling of this is to leave the casino issue out there like a big fat piñata, so the pro-Deval people will feel the need to take a poke at the governor,” says one Democratic legislator. “It would be very smart inside politics to separate the governor from his base.”

To read about Patrick's potential counterpunch, go on to the next page...