Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006 | 7:52 a.m.
Lance Lehto knows there's a high cost to Wal-Mart's "always low" prices.
He says the nation's largest retailer almost put his local Kmart out of business a few years ago when it opened a Supercenter across the street in his California hometown. But Lehto, who is 47 and repairs excavation equipment in the Las Vegas Valley, doesn't hold a grudge.
In fact, he couldn't seem to care less about Wal-Mart's behavior as he loaded groceries into his pickup truck outside the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market at Silverado Ranch Boulevard and Bermuda Road on Tuesday night.
"Everything I'm wearing I got from Wal-Mart," he says, donning a "Money Talks" baseball cap. "I'm proud of that, too."
So it's probably a safe bet that when the "Change Wal-Mart, Change America" bus tour rolls into Las Vegas on Saturday, Lehto - and many big-box consumers across the valley like him - won't be part of the welcoming party.
Indeed, the union-backed tour of 19 states is landing like a Nerf ball in Nevada. Elsewhere, Democratic members of the U.S. House and Senate have jumped at the opportunity to use Wal-Mart as a cudgel in the political debate. Wal-Mart stands for all that is wrong for working-class Americans, they say - low wages, poor health benefits and the loss of local ownership.
But by all indications, Nevada activists, shoppers and even Democratic politicians are giving the tour a collective shrug. Only gubernatorial candidate Dina Titus plans to speak at the bus tour stop.
And even that stop has dubious underpinnings. The bus originally was to be the featured attraction at a rally in the parking lot of a Las Vegas Wal-Mart. But it has since been rerouted to a previously scheduled rally, effectively crashing the state Democratic Party's "Ticket to Victory" event at the Teamsters Local 631 union hall.
The reasons for the absent enthusiasm speak to the nature of Nevada.
First, this is a union state. One in seven workers belongs to a union, and those unions are politically active.
Also, unlike other major metropolitan areas , Las Vegas does not have a thriving political-activist community. Once vibrant in the 1960s and '70s, the activist scene has since faded, leaving no real grass-roots network of support, said Michael Green, a Nevada historian at the Community College of Southern Nevada.
"The growth has been so incredible that there was no real passing of the baton," Green said. The valley's 24-hour work schedule and lifestyle makes traditional forms of organizing even more difficult, he said.
The group conducting the tour is Wake Up Wal-Mart, financed by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. The group said it chose Las Vegas and other cities for stops primarily for their political significance leading up to the 2008 presidential elections. Nevada's newfound status as host of an early caucus - second only to Iowa - makes it an important stop.
The tour does, however, provide Nevada's gubernatorial candidates a chance to emphasize their sharp differences.
"This is a free-market society," said Robert Uithoven, the campaign manager for Republican candidate Jim Gibbons. "Nevada is a right-to-work state."
Uithoven said in a telephone interview that Titus' appearance at the rally "speaks to her opposition of Nevada as a right-to-work state."
Uithoven also said that the rally "sounds like a political campaign to unionize a company that wishes not to do so."
For Titus, Wal-Mart is a symbol of corporate irresponsibility - one that she has invoked throughout the course of her campaign, turning the name of the big-box retailer into an unflattering verb. "We shouldn't Wal-Mart-ize Nevada," she said. "We should be attracting companies that not only provide good salaries but good benefits."
To do that, Titus proposed giving tax incentives to businesses that provide affordable health insurance . She also said the state should continue to pursue federal dollars through the Health Insurance Flexibility & Accountability program, which if successful would allow the state to fund a health-insurance pool for small businesses.
Asked about Titus' tax incentive proposal, Uithoven said, "She's not talking about her money. She's talking about taxpayer money. Dina Titus doesn't have a good record of looking out for taxpayer money."
Titus offered a different take. "This is not one of those liberal issues that's anti-business," she said. "I think it's pro-business. We want good businesses that provide benefits. We want good-paying jobs so people can buy products that businesses sell. I think it's a middle-class issue. It's all about health insurance."
A poll of 1,105 Nevadans earlier this year - conducted by national pollster Peter Hart and commissioned by the state's gaming industry - ranked "making health care more affordable" just behind "improving the quality of K-12 public schools" as the most important issue to voters.
The absence of involvement in the bus tour by other Nevada Democrats is a reflection of the fast pace of the tour, but also of a lack of organization by Silver State candidates.
The tour has been the subject of stories in The New York Times and other media during the last week. But aside from Titus, Democratic candidates the Sun spoke to hadn't heard of the tour until Wednesday afternoon.
For a state party and candidates trying to convince naysayers in Iowa and New Hampshire that they are organized enough to stage an important race in the presidential primary season, the disorganization doesn't bode well.
So Wake Up Wal-Mart has adjusted. In Iowa, the tour traversed the state for days, holding press conferences with prominent Democrats, including Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
Here, the campaign rolls into town Saturday morning - just in time to crash the Democratic party , before packing up and moving on to Santa Monica, Calif., the same day.
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