Casino culture

Despite last week’s burying of Gov. Deval Patrick’s casino bill, don’t look for the gambling industry to go quietly into the good night.  The Boston Herald reports today that casino interests are keeping a steady eye on the Bay State for fresh opportunities to take another run at legalizing casino gambling.  "Politics is patience and perseverance," Jan Jones, government affairs cheese for Harrah’s Entertainment, tells the Herald.  It almost sounds like the sort of keep-on-keepin’-on attitude that eventually led to victory in heroic battles for women’s suffrage or voting rights for blacks. 

Those are not exactly the sort of references used by casino critics to describe the relentless drive of the gambling industry.  In a 2005 article in CommonWealth magazine on the perennial push for expanded gambling, state Rep. Dan Bosley, the Legislature’s leading casino opponent, offered a different sort of imagery:

One year, the Legislature voted down a gaming bill on a Monday or Tuesday, then, “on Thursday one of the gambling interests came in to see me and says, ‘How can we change your mind,’” [Bosley] says. “It’s like Freddy Krueger. It keeps showing up no matter how many movies it dies at the end of.”