Wait-and-see for D'Amato's new dawn

On the plus side, life isn't going to be dull should Alfonse D'Amato indeed be the Poker Player Alliance's new chairman.

A Senator for 18 years and now head of his own lobbying firm, D'Amato's ability to get what he wants is legendary and the manner in which he goes about it is rarely dull. Just a few factoids to whet your appetite for the PPA's new era:

• D'Amato became a published author with his book of recollections, Power, Pasta and Politics
• He’s been referred to as the 'Austin Powers of Island Park'
• "Congressman Eliot L. Engel, Bronx Democrat: “If people only sent him $500, he’d call back and say, ‘Why didn’t you send a thousand?’ If they sent a thousand, he’d call and say, ‘What’s wrong with your wife? Why can’t she send a thousand, too?’ You gotta love that. It’s so New York.”
• As chairman of the Senate Whitewater hearings in 1995 and '96, D'Amato said he wanted "every child in America to know how to spell subpoena." - CNN
• "D'Amato is like a roach," says a Clinton adviser. "He's hard to kill. You keep stomping on him, but he just scuttles away." - ibid.
• Another nickname - "Senator Pothole"
• "He's the King of Stealth," said Blair Horner, legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group. "...he's got a treasure-trove of political chits, he knows how the system works and he probably has the hottest contacts of any Republican lobbyist." - New York Daily News
• During the Don Imus radio program in 1995, he used a mock Japanese accent to impersonate Lance Ito, the Japanese-American judge overseeing the OJ Simpson trial
• In 1994, he insulted Betsy McCaughey Ross, the Republican candidate for New York Lieutenant Governor, joking that to get an endorsement for her running mate, George Pataki, she should have sex with New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had endorsed Mario Cuomo
• D'Amato had a brief cameo as himself in the 1997 movie The Devil's Advocate
• "In a private meeting Tuesday with about 40 Jewish supporters, [D'Amato] called Schumer a ''putzhead'' and referred to the heavyset Nadler as ''Congressman Waddler.'' He also did a physical imitation of Nadler, D-N.Y., waddling like a duck." - USA Today
• "In 1986, a filibuster he conducted against a military bill lasted 23 hours, 30 minutes and he was known for reading the District of Columbia phonebook during a filibuster. On another occasion he once filibustered a bill that would have caused the loss of 750 jobs in upstate New York by singing "South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)" - Wikipedia
• Made $500,000 with one phone call when persuading New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority to lease a developer's Manhattan building. The lease was accompanied by a $230 million bank loan in the developer's favour. D'Amato got $100,000 up front, as a retainer, and $400,000 commission if his call was successful.

A word of warning, however. So desperate is the plight of on-line American players becoming, that it is easy to seize upon this appointment as the point at which the tide begins to turn.

We British onlookers, however, will keep the champagne on ice just for now, for we remember a man called Robert Kilroy-Silk.

He it was who seemed to be a similar knight in shining armour when the fledgling UK Independence Party - pledged to stop the UK surrendering its autonomy to a federalist European Union - sought a high-profile heavyweight to push it into mainstream politics.

Kilroy-Silk, however, repeatedly gives the impression of a man deeply in love with himself and it was hard to avoid the suspicion that his rapid fall-out with his new party was not so much a matter of how it had failed its aims as how it had failed his ambitions.

So whatever Alfonse D'Amato has done or not done in the past, the deal here and now is simple: if his sense of vocation is bigger than his ego, then these could be good times for the PPA. If not, well some of us at least will know not to be too surprised.