Has a Sitting President of the U.S. Ever Gambled in a Las Vegas Casino?
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Has a sitting president of the United States ever sat down at a slot machine or card table in a Las Vegas casino to play? For how long? Did they win? Which casino(s) and when?
A:
[Editor's Note: This answer is penned by LVA business and political blogger David McKee.]
No. Never. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.
It might not be political suicide for a sitting president of the United States to gamble at a casino, in Las Vegas or elsewhere, but the upside is virtually nil. It would offend many voters and be a very poor (or at least undignified) optic to see the leader of the free world behaving like a fanny-packing gambler. The security nightmares should be obvious.
Besides, if POTUS won any money, it would look like taking a bribe from Big Gaming.
That's not to say all politicians avoid casinos, but very very few darken their doors, even to glad-hand potential voters — although many solicit and accept donations from the gaming industry.
A few have even dared to alienate it. Before she was vice president, then-Senator Kamala Harris appeared at a Culinary Union rally. Joe Biden went even further, helping picket Palms Casino Resort when it was still owned by rabidly anti-labor Station Casinos. Presidential wannabes have stayed at Las Vegas Strip resorts, including Bellagio and the Venetian, but even they stayed the heck away from the casino floor.
John F. Kennedy, when he was a senator from Massachusetts, but also while he was running for president in 1960, did come close. He showed up at the Sands and kept company with Frank Sinatra and Judith Exner, a party girl and later mistress of two Chicago Outfit bosses, whom the Sands' bosses attached to the future president to bottle him up and keep tabs on him. As the story goes, when Kennedy was elected president, emissaries from the White House showed up at the Sands, demanding whatever surveillance film and photographs the bosses had with Kennedy in them and wanting to know exactly whom he was with.
We can recall only one federal-level elected official patronizing a casino to gamble and it took a man of exceptional courage: the late Senator John McCain from Arizona. He was known to play craps at Las Vegas casinos, particularly if he was in town for a boxing match, being a fan of the sweet science. To his credit, his pugilistic enthusiasm didn't extend to mixed martial arts, which he memorably described as “human cockfighting.”
Oh, and don’t forget virtuecrat and canting hypocrite William Bennett (not to be confused with the casino owner of the same name). Bennett served as secretary of education from 1985 to 1988 under Ronald Reagan and was director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under George H. W. Bush; he's also the author of The Book of Virtues, which, drawing on stories from the Bible, American history, Greek mythology, English poetry, fairy tales, and modern fiction contains hundreds of examples of good and bad, right and wrong. Bennett was exposed as a compulsive slot player who’d lost $8 million in casinos while loudly deploring people “ruled by appetite.” The 2003 revelation canceled Bennett from his career in public life and ended his standing as America’s holier-than-all moral arbiter.
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