With debate, Nevada gets its 15 minutes

By Jeff German, Steve Kanigher

Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007 | 1:16 a.m.

You knew there would be a few cheap shots and cliched one-liners about the gambling, the gangsters and the other things that long have made Las Vegas such an easy target, wrapped around endless variations on the city's famous "What happens here ... " marketing slogan - and there were.

But Las Vegas' moment in the spotlight as the host of Thursday night's nationally televised Democratic presidential debate produced many more flattering references than put-downs in media coverage, helping the city to further polish its self-image and national reputation.

There were picturesque visuals of the Strip. Commentators spoke admiringly of Las Vegas' growth and the relative prosperity fueled by it. Readers and viewers were told that the challenges confronting Nevadans - energy costs, burgeoning infrastructure demands, education, immigration, alarming foreclosure rates - are largely the issues of the heartland and the rest of the country.

And, on a simplistic but hardly insignificant level, the pre-debate TV shots of sun-kissed palms and political analysts going about their business outside in shirt sleeves had to look attractive to those living in parts of the country where winter coats already are out of the closet.

"It's part of the maturation process that Las Vegas has gone through," Democratic strategist Dan Hart said. "I think we've turned the corner from just a resort destination to a real community in the eyes of the nation."

Although national publicity is nothing new to Las Vegas, much of it in the past has been the kind that city leaders would have just as soon avoided.

Significantly, the coverage spawned by the two-hour debate at UNLV's Cox Pavilion wrapped up a week that started with Las Vegas already in the national media glare - over the preliminary hearing in the O.J. Simpson criminal case.

Fair or not, the Simpson episode - which resulted in the former football star and two co-defendants ordered to stand trial on kidnapping, robbery and other charges stemming from the Palace Station raid during which Simpson allegedly forcibly reclaimed some of his sports memorabilia - seemed to reinforce, among some, the city's image as a place that still ranks high on the sleaze scale.

The Simpson matter drew glancing attention from some of the national media in town for the debate, but the focus remained on the Democratic showdown itself and Las Vegas' role in hosting it.

By week's end, that left Las Vegas basking in what, for it, was a rarer variety of national media attention - being treated as a big-time city with typical urban concerns, and as a deserving, legitimate player in national politics via its first-ever presidential debate and early Jan. 19 caucus.

Vince Alberta, a spokesman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said the debate and its accompanying media attention moved Las Vegas beyond the country's initial perceptions of the city.

"It provided a different look at what we have to offer," he said. "I think that's very powerful and very beneficial to all the interests in this community."

The debate's moderator, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, pointed out Nevada's "starring role" in the presidential primary process, telling millions of television viewers that the seven Democratic candidates invited had come to spar in one of the nation's "fastest growing" and "most prosperous" states.

In the run-up to the debate, there still were skeptics about Nevada's arrival on the national political scene.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins, for one, wasn't very impressed with the state's new-found political prominence.

"This is a great honor, which appears to have done Nevada no good whatsoever," Collins wrote in a column that ran the morning of the debate.

"All Nevada wants out of the deal, as far as I can tell, is to stop the government from putting used radioactive waste into Yucca Mountain ... At least they aren't demanding that we make gasoline out of used poker chips."

In a story in Thursday's Washington Post, national political reporter Shailagh Murray said that leading up to the debate, Nevada had struggled to draw attention from the presidential candidates. "Despite booming growth that has turned Nevada into a Florida of the desert," Murray wrote, "its political culture remains strictly small-town, with a handful of power brokers, union bosses and niche national concerns - such as whether to dump nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain - dominating the conversation."

Even CNN, which aired and co-sponsored the debate, couldn't stop itself from playing to the city's long-standing reputation, promoting the debate as "Sin City Showdown" or "High Stakes Vegas Rumble."

Despite such slights, Las Vegas and Nevada fared well in the national debate coverage, typified by a segment earlier in the week for "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" on PBS.

"Its famous ad campaign encourages the notion that this is the city where it's OK to misbehave, because 'what happens here, stays here,'" correspondent Ray Suarez reported.

"It's a city unlike any other, yet when the gamblers head home, the people who live and work here face the same everyday challenges people all across America do - social and economic concerns, how to live and at what cost."

The country learned through the media last week that Las Vegas, like other cities, is grappling with a high foreclosure rate and a rising immigration problem.

Stories also noted that, although organized labor is on the decline across the country, it is thriving in Las Vegas and influential in Nevada politics. There also were frequent references to Southern Nevada's increasing Hispanic population and the candidates' efforts to court the potentially critical constituency.

In a pre-debate segment on CNN, political analyst Bill Schneider described Las Vegas as a place where dreams can still be fulfilled, a vision that draws 5,000 new residents each month.

"Who are these people?" Schneider asked. "They're young people with families taking new jobs in the booming service sector. They're retirees, veterans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans."

Schneider also noted that Nevada, of all places, is a bellwether state that has voted for the winner in every presidential election since 1912, except for 1976.

In the end, a simple question asked during the debate may have done the most to lend legitimacy to the state in the eyes of the nation.

The subject? Yucca Mountain and what to do about possibly storing the nation's deadly nuclear waste there.

After nearly 25 years, the state's David vs. Goliath battle to block the federal government and the high-powered nuclear industry from storing the waste 90 miles outside Las Vegas had finally risen to the level of presidential politics - on a national stage.

In Las Vegas, they call it beating the odds.