Well, This Will Play Great in Vegas

Hmmm, it looks like the Clinton campaign is hitting Obama on his anti-gambling stance in Nevada.

Barack Obama has warned about the dangers of gambling — that it carries a “moral and social cost” that could “devastate” poor communities. As a state senator in Illinois, he at times opposed plans to expand gambling, worrying that it could be especially harmful to low-income people.

sanctimony, and anti-gambling self-righteousness won’t go over well in Nevada.

That being said, the fact that it’s taken Clinton’s campaign so long to find this indicates that just perhaps, she is surrounded by a bunch of drooling idiots as political advisers *cough* Mark Penn *cough*

Obama, an avid poker player, developed a reputation in Illinois as a critic of gambling. He voted against a 1999 measure to extend riverboat gambling to include boats stationed at dockside.

But Obama was not dogmatic. In submitting campaign questionnaires in 1998 and 2002 for the anti-gambling group Illinois Churches in Action, he left himself room to back the industry, answering “undecided” on whether he favored adding riverboat and land-based casinos. On a 2002 questionnaire bearing his signature, the words “not sure” were penciled in as answers to questions about several forms of expansion, such as moving casinos from rivers to land and raising the gambling age to 21.

Asked about Obama’s stance on gambling, his presidential campaign sent a list of quotations from the candidate in which he distinguished between Illinois and Nevada when talking about the industry.

In the comments cited by the campaign, Obama cast the industry’s effect on Nevada in a positive light. For example, he told the Associated Press last month that gambling could be a “successful economic model” as long as it was “properly regulated.”

Sanctimony, and hypocrisy.

Sorry, when someone serves up a softball like this, you need to hit it out of the park.

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