Hello and welcome to the GamblingCompliance podcast, coming to you with just over four weeks to go before one of the most eagerly awaited US presidential elections in living memory.

Understandably, the crisis in the US financial sector is currently top of the agenda in campaign debates, although foreign policy concerns regarding Iraq, Afghanistan and Russia will be certain to regain prominence in the run up to election day.

However, almost from nowhere – or rather courtesy of the agenda-setting and Obama-backing New York Times – gambling has also found its way onto the electoral agenda. Over the weekend the Times published a lengthy article exploring Senator McCain’s links with lobbyists close to several Indian gaming tribes, including those behind the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos in Connecticut.

The Times cited a leading US academic as describing McCain as “one of the founding fathers of Indian gaming”, largely due to his instrumental role in shaping and re-shaping the 1989 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act during his two stints as chairman of the US Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee.

McCain supported the efforts of tribes specifically seeking federal recognition to set up casinos during the mid-90s and then, the Times claims, later blocked attempts from elsewhere in the Senate to rein in the boom of Indian gaming venues across the country.

But for McCain’s recognition as a “founding father” of the now $26bn US tribal gaming sector, most tribes are likely to be backing Senator Obama rather than McCain this November.

Whereas McCain once supported federal recognition for gaming tribes, the Arizona Senator’s stance on this matter has since cooled, says Professor Joseph Kelly from New York State University College, Buffalo.
 
And Joe Valandra, a former Bush Administration chief of staff at the National Indian Gaming Commission, adds that McCain also supports the Bush administration’s current policy of restricting the ability of tribes to set up casinos away from their main tribal lands.

In fact, it was even McCain who introduced formal legislation to that effect in 2005, and, according to the New York Times, McCain has remained instrumental in formulating White House policy on off-reservation tribal gaming during the second Bush term.

By contrast, Valandra said that Senator Obama would “at least consider” a change of approach on off-reservation tribal casinos.

But the Obama campaign’s gambling links have also come under scrutiny in recent weeks. Obama is well known for his occasional poker games with lobbyists, where he plays for nickels, but it was also revealed that the son of Obama’s running mate Joe Biden had until recently worked as a lobbyist in Washington DC for Gibraltar-based internet gambling operator PartyGaming.

Obama’s campaign team has been at pains to point out that R. Hunter Biden has now dropped PartyGaming as a client and no longer works as a lobbyist. And what’s more, experts believe that the link will make no difference when it comes to the prospects for a change of approach on online gambling within the White House from 2009.

From a European perspective other issues may also prove slow to change.

For example, the prohibition on internet gambling payment processing enshrined by the October 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act is frozen in White House policy regardless of whether McCain or Obama emerges victorious this November.

John McCain would be certain to veto any legislation hinting at a repeal of the UIGEA, Anthony Cabot of law firm Lewis & Rocha wrote in a recent article. But neither would Obama’s ascent to the presidency trigger any substantive change in White House internet gambling policy, experts believe.

As Bob Stocker of law firm Dickinson & Wright said at a recent gaming conference in Singapore, “nothing is going to happen on the issue for at least two years so you can forget about any dramatic movement on internet gaming in the US.”

McCain’s past links with gaming interests, and his fondness for all night sessions staking $100 chips at the craps tables of Connecticut, may intrigue the American media, but there may not be quite so much at stake for the wider gaming industry this November.

According to Stocker, “the bottom line is that the situation in the US means that even if Obama gets elected it is not going to change much. The exception is in the Indian gaming category, where Obama may allow off-reservation casinos, but other than that you won’t see a lot of change in the US.”

Change you can believe in? For the gambling industry, not quite.