I agree with Blake T, the use of an asterisk in the table name seems problematic.
I am not sure if it is a bug, but I have always run into issues using triple quotes for line continuation within the interactive Python Window in ArcGIS Desktop. Even in other interpreters, the newline character will be preserved in the string, which may or may not be desirable depending on your specific situation. Beyond triple quotes, strings wrapped in parentheses don't need backslashes for continuation either. If you want to use backslashes or parentheses, each line needs to be a complete string literal. For example,
>>> 'This is an example of ' \
... 'line continuation using backslashes'
...
'This is an example of line continuation using backslashes'
>>> ('This is an example of '
... 'line continuation using parentheses')
...
'This is an example of line continuation using parentheses'
Within the interactive Python Window in ArcGIS Desktop, but not all interactive interpreters, you will need to use Shift+Enter instead of Enter when using backslashes, likely do to the same oddity that causes issues with triple quote line continuations. Line continutation using parentheses doesn't have this issue, using just Enter works fine.