Iwas one of the nearly two-thirds of California residents who voted in March 2000 for Proposition 1A, a ballot measure that amended the state constitution, no less, to allow Las Vegas-style casino gambling on Indian reservations.

It's the worst vote I ever cast.

I was duped by California's gaming tribes, which spent a whopping $8 million of their blackjack and slot machine profits on persuasive television commercials.

"Gaming has replaced welfare with work, despair with hope, and dependency with reliance," spake Mark Macarro, the pony-tailed chairman of the Pechanga band of Luiseno Indians.

"If Prop. 1A is not passed," he fretted, "Indian casinos in California could be shut down, and the jobs and economic benefits they provide will be lost."

No one who empathized with America's most needful minority wanted that.

Not when a third of Indian families continued to subsist below the poverty line. When half were jobless on the reservation. When a third of Indian youngsters continued to drop out of high school. When a fifth of Indian families lived in homes lacking indoor toilets and telephones.

As it turns out, California's gaming tribes were simply laying a guilt trip on the Golden State's pale skins and black skins and brown skins.

Sure, Macarro and his fellow tribal chairmen were interested in uplifting their poor and downtrodden brothers and sisters. But they were more interested in growing their gambling operations to Las Vegas-like proportions.

They didn't merely want to maintain their existing level of gaming -- the thousands of card tables, the thousands of slot machines -- they wanted to open new casinos, to exponentially increase the overall number of tables and slots in the state.

The ethnic preference the state's voters bestowed upon the tribes - - allowing them to operate casinos, while continuing to forbid whites, blacks and browns from doing so -- allowed them to recruit out-of-state investors that promised to put up most, if not all, of the investment money.

Meanwhile, the gaming tribes have spent more than $120 million over the past five years to back their pet candidates and ballot initiatives, according to the state Fair Political Practices Commission.

"That's a staggering sum of money," commission chairwoman Karen Getman said last year, more than any other special interest in the state. "You have to remember," she added, "that every penny of it was intended to influence the outcome of an election, or some legislative proposal."

Indeed, almost every piece of Indian-related legislation that has come before lawmakers in Sacramento since passage of 1A would further subordinate the interests of the state's 36 million residents to the putative sovereignty of the state's tribes.

The most pernicious was a measure that would have required government agencies to notify tribes of any development projects proposed within five miles of a reservation. If a project threatened a "sacred" site, a developer would have to seek mitigation acceptable to the tribe.

If "sacred" sites had become the law of the state, it would have given tribes effective veto power over land-use decisions in many California counties.

In fact, the measure's five-mile notice would have applied to much of San Diego County, the nation's sixth most populous, which boasts some 18 Indian reservations.

The legislation did not pass this year, but the tribes have hardly given up on it. They'll grease as many palms in Sacramento as necessary to get the measure enacted next year.

That's why the tribes have spent so much on California's recall election, more than any other special interest.

With more than $3 million in direct campaign contributions, they've bought and paid for Democrat Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, whom they hope to succeed Gray Davis, the incumbent Democrat governor.

The tribes figure that by pumping up McClintock, who has little chance of actually being elected, they can split the Republican vote, ensuring a Bustamante victory.

And McClintock, who portrays himself as a conservative man of principle, is only too happy to go along with the Morongo tribe's cynical political maneuver, to blithely accept their special interest largesse.>

California's gaming tribes have made fools of those of us who supported Proposition 1A. Who never envisioned that the measure's passage would lead to a proliferation of casinos in the state. Who never imagined that the tribes' gambling riches would corrupt the state's political process.

A hard lesson has been learned: No well-intentioned vote goes unpunished.

Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune.

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