The Nevada caucuses are on Saturday, but you don't hear much from the candidates about what's gone wrong economically in Las Vegas.
LAS VEGAS — Before you write off Vegas, which looks like the American Dream in a pawn shop at 3 a.m., the irrepressible Oscar B. Goodman wants to make a case.
“We’re opening up the new Mob museum later this month, and that’s special, you know, because our heritage came from the Mob,” says Goodman, who was three-term mayor of this town, until his wife, Carolyn, took over last year. Before that he was a Mob lawyer, who, upon entering politics, said it was unwise to call him after 5 p.m., because there was a good chance he’d be drunk.
Dare to dis Vegas, with its yellowed, tattered edges showing everywhere, its billboards for “discount bankruptcy” more ubiquitous than Wayne Newton signs, the urban face for a state with the nation’s highest unemployment rate and percentage of homes in foreclosure, and you get a Goodman mouthful.
“Listen, I believe I could pass a polygraph test on this, but we have the best chefs in the world, and our sports bars are…” — you get the picture.
Once, in a galaxy far, far away, Time magazine put this everlighted desert outpost on its cover with the tag line: “Las Vegas — The New All-American City.” There followed many years when Vegas was the nation’s fastest-growing metropolis, adding 70,000 people a year, leading in job growth, its theme-tourism and casinos and multi-tiered service economy heralded as a role model for the rest of the country.
Las Vegas, said the casino mogul Steve Wynn back in the mid-1990s, “represents all the things people in every city in America like.” Of course, he also said one of his gaudy creations was “what God would have built if he had the money,” which gives you some hint of his civic pride.
And so America became more like Vegas, casinos sprouting across the fruited plain, until every state in the nation but Hawaii and Utah had some form of legalized gambling, and national gross revenues exceeded $30 billion a year. Even Kansas got into the numbers racket. And as the low-paying service economy replaced jobs in manufacturing, those workers were hailed as the coal miners of a new era.
Except, those workers didn’t make anything. And there’s the flip side of Vegas as the template for the new American city: it represents casino capitalism at its worst. Home mortgages for all! Casinos in every neighborhood! No personal or corporate income tax! Developers get whatever they want! All hail the rich! It was supposed to defy nature, because everyone knows gambling is recession-proof.
Oops. The hangover is a doozy; almost five years and counting, unemployment is still in double digits, and thousands have left town, leaving mortgages behind with the furniture. As the late Hunter S. Thompson said, “For losers, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.”
Now Vegas seems more like Pottersville, the dystopian city that replaced Bedford Falls in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” And who is Mr. Potter? Why, it’s Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino tycoon who is almost single-handedly keeping Newt Gingrich in the presidential race, with a husband-and-wife $10 million donation to the toxic Gingrich super PAC. The Nevada variant of the Supreme Court’s corporations-are-people era is an aging gambling king: Newt’s sugar daddy, the ninth richest man in the world.
I exaggerate a bit about Vegas’s hard times. The construction crane, known as the state bird, is not extinct, though it appears endangered. On Super Bowl Sunday, great rivers of money will gush through the windowless centers of sports betting here. Plus, I still have a soft spot for any city with the audacity to use fantasy projection as its architectural guide.
Vegas is both an enduring American theme pasted to an arid hide — anything goes, at any time, clustered around The Strip, which is outside the city limits — and a valley of almost 2 million people trying to make a fresh go of it.
What happened was, one ethos infected the other, and that became the wrong model. In allowing banks and Wall Street to place bets on any piece of paper tied to property — without much consequence for the bettors, as it turned out — the titans of free enterprise embraced casino capitalism.
Now, with the presidential campaign in Nevada for a week, in advance of Saturday’s first-in-the-West Republican caucus, you would think we’d be hearing much vigorous debate on what went wrong, here and everywhere that followed the model.
But no. I saw Mitt Romney give a stump speech in a warehouse stuffed with boxes of toilet paper. He never mentioned foreclosures, or how banks should behave, or why the educational system was so impoverished in a state where corporate barons ran free and most taxes came from gambling or retail sales. Gambling, remember, is the ultimate regressive tax. (I mean gaming — the euphemism of choice here).
When he spoke, Romney was within neon-illumination distance of both The Strip and a sea of foreclosures, and yet he talked about the economic implications of neither. Perhaps that’s just as well. Romney’s position — that the housing market should just be allowed to bottom out, the market grim reaper rolling through the red-tiled subdivisions — is not popular in Nevada.
And the proposal that President Obama unveiled Wednesday, government aid for distressed homeowners seeking lower lending rates, is dead on arrival in Congress.
Obama got in trouble earlier when he tried to engage the mentality behind the go-go period. “When times are tough,” he said in 2010, “you don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.”
Wrong. You blow the college fund, and then vote for lower taxes. At least, that seems to be one message I picked up from some Nevada Republicans.
So we return to Oscar Goodman, who was furious at Obama’s comments, but says the Republicans are skirting the real issues. Goodman is honest enough to admit his own political mistakes.
“I wasn’t smart enough to see any of this coming,” he said of the epic collapse of the Nevada economy. “A lot of folks didn’t think you’d ever have to pay the piper.”
Goodman is a self-professed independent, the fastest-growing political entity in the West. When I spoke to him, he was excited about one economic plus in town — a new steakhouse and bar, Oscar’s, named for the man who once represented Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro, who inspired the character memorably played by Joe Pesci in “Casino.”
Ah, but even Oscar’s is a bit of a mirage. Goodman doesn’t own it or manage it, despite the bar’s liberal use of his image and memorabilia. “They’ve licensed my persona,” he says.
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