Mysterious question about casino gambling

The mark of a successful political convention is an absence of surprises.

By the time thousands of Republicans fled Columbus last weekend, the forces of Ron Paul had been routed with a heavy hand. Not a surprise.

Delegates to the annual state convention had rebuked the Gop-controlled Legislature for refusing to get serious about ethics reform. Important but predictable, given the anger of tea partyists.

And the Republican party’s executive committee, just before delegates jumped into their cars, had announced the five nonbinding questions that will be placed before GOP voters on the July 31 primary ballot.

Topping the list: “Should Georgia have casino gambling with funds going to education?” Boom. The very topic stunned the highest-perched Republicans in the land. “The casino question was a shock coming out of the convention — given the prominence of social conservatives in the party infrastructure,” said Brian Robinson, spokesman for Deal. “The governor’s office was as surprised as anyone to hear about it.”

The one exception was state GOP chairman Sue Everhart, who this week took responsibility for the decision. No monied interests had pushed for the question, she said. And the party’s most recent financial disclosure, for April, shows no contributions from the gambling world. (We’ll check again later.)

Everhart said the casino question was prompted by emailed messages from two or three GOP activists who complained of the cash that was leaking away to gaming havens in Mississippi and North Carolina.

“They said if we didn’t do something before long, the Indians were going to do something, and we wouldn’t get any tax revenue out of that,” Everhart said.

And just who made these arguments? “I’m not going to throw anyone from the grassroots under the bus,” the chairman said.

To a person, members of the executive committee we spoke with said they were given no advance notice of the casino question, which lost on a first vote by the committee, and won only after it was emphasized that placing the question on the ballot didn’t constitute an endorsement.

However humble its origins might be, the simple wording of the GOP ballot question matches well with a daring, $91,000 study released last year by the Georgia Lottery Corp., which proposed

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