Politics and sport have never made comfortable bedfellows but unlike the mainstream of sporting enterprise politics and racing are joined at the hip, an old, co-dependent odd couple.
State governments, the beneficiary of taxes skimmed from betting pools, also serve as regulatory and licensing agencies for all things that involve gambling and, like most things political, those appointed to leadership positions are usually in power, with predictable result, due to various considerations having more to do with influence and largesse than expertise.

Nothing of importance happens in the racing business without the cooperation of government, which is far more often an impediment than facilitator. Past performance is clear. The racing industry in New York and those who wield power in Albany have for many decades spent far more time at loggerheads than in harmony. The results have been mixed.

At the extremes: The nation’s first system of off-track betting, established here in the early 1970s, is a blueprint for failure manifest in the bankruptcy of the New York Off-Track Betting Corporation late last year. The financial-incentive architecture of the state’s breeding industry, when fully funded, is easily the nation’s most beneficial to what is an important agribusiness and also to those who own and race horses bred in New York. The award of a contract to operate a video lottery-terminal casino at Aqueduct, now in construction, took more than a decade of high political drama. The completion of that project will result in the nation’s most lucrative purse structure at Aqueduct, Belmont Park and Saratoga Race Course, a new and promising era for the sport in New York.

Most of the time, racing issues have little priority among those in Albany and the industry at large is treated like the red-headed stepchild, an inconvenient distraction to those who are more concerned with maintaining political fiefdoms and spheres of influence in the nation’s most heavily-taxed state.

At the moment, the whole of the racing industry stands at a turning point while the current governor, Andrew Cuomo, is embroiled in a battle to lead a bankrupt government to functional insolvency. In the first half of the first year of his administration, Cuomo has displayed an unfamiliar commitment to good sense in New York government and the announcement that Bennett Liebman, a widely respected figure in racing circles, will join the administration in a new and long-needed capacity is both a mild surprise and sign that this administration actually understands the benefits of enlightened leadership. Imagine that.

Until his appointment as Deputy Secretary of Gaming and Racing, Liebman was the Executive Director of the Government Law Center of Albany Law School, where he has served as the coordinator of a program on Racing and Gaming Law, which he founded in 2002. He taught courses on Sports and the Law, Government and Gambling and hosted the annual Saratoga Institute on Racing and Gaming Law. Liebman served as counsel for the Assembly Racing and Wagering Committee and, from 1988 to 2000, served as a commissioner of the New York State Racing and Wagering Board. He sits on the New York Racing Association Board of Trustees, has written extensively on a wide variety of topic pertaining to the sport for many law journals and publications including the New York Times. He has addressed a multitude of public forums and a web site he founded, the now discontinued Racing and Gaming Today, was the Internet’s original aggregator of industry news.

More than a political animal, lawyer, writer and educator, Liebman is a fan of racing, a student of the game and activist who has an objective view of important issues and always willing to offer critical advice to those in the seat of power regardless of partisan affiliation. He understands the benefit of a healthy racing industry to the state’s economy and has no agenda beyond legal considerations and the health of the sport in the future. This is indeed a refreshing, unexpected and hopeful development to those involved in every aspect of the industry.

In Liebman, the governor has made a wise, well-timed appointment and shown an awareness of racing’s contribution to the state’s economy, a view absent from the last several administrations including that of Cuomo, the elder. Hopefully, when Liebman offers advice to those whose votes actually count in the New York legislative process, the otherwise distracted politicians to whom he speaks will be listening.