Demagogue Politician Blames Election Loss on Online Casino Fans

But the ex-Congressman acknowledges that public awareness of his resistance to Internet casinos helped cost him his seat on Capitol Hill.

Jim Leach, a former Republican Representative from Iowa who helped craft the UIGEA, still has plenty of unfounded mistruths to offer against online gambling. But the ex-Congressman acknowledges that public awareness of his resistance to Internet casinos helped cost him his seat on Capitol Hill.

Leach was among the first political opponents of Internet gaming to be challenged by a growing grassroots movement to vocalize popular support for the freedom to choose to gamble at online casinos. He lost his re-election bid in 2006, after poker players unified against him as a result of his involvement in the UIGEA.

"I realized that support for the bill jeopardized my re-election," says Leach, presently employed as a professor of public affairs at Princeton University.

Still, Leach continues to insist on disproved assertions as fact, stating about online gambling that it "is so seductively habit-forming that individuals can in short order lose their homes and jobs and, indeed, their families and futures. And the effects on individuals redound into society."

Scientific study has found exactly the opposite to be true. Such disparate sources as Dr. Howard Shaffer, head of the Harvard Medical School's Division of Addictions and Professor Dan Ross, director of research for South Africa's National Responsible Gaming Program, agree that Internet gambling is less harmful and addictive than land-based gaming.

Leach says libertarian calls for freedom do not excuse the perceived social ills of online casinos. But, as OCA senior gaming analyst Sherman Bradley notes,"Those ills exist largely in Leach's imagination. Perhaps he should reconcile his loss of the people's confidence with his inability to make objective observations free from his preconceptions."