These days, it’s tough being D-Sin City

By Lisa Mascaro

Sunday, March 15, 2009 | 2 a.m.

One day last month, Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley stepped into a Capitol elevator and found herself face to face with the Republican congressman who had railed against the “sin express train” to Vegas during the height of the economic stimulus debate.

The congressman from Idaho, a very nice man, as Berkley tells it, struck up a friendly conversation.

“How’s Las Vegas?” he said.

Berkley raises her hand, traffic-cop style.

“I said, ‘Don’t even talk to me! I would appreciate if you stopped bad-mouthing my city.’

“He says, ‘I love Las Vegas.’

“And I said, ‘Love Las Vegas? Do you know the situation we have right now?’ ”

As the elevator clicked to the next floor, Berkley held forth about the foreclosure crisis, declining visitors to the Strip. “If you love Las Vegas so much, you would stop saying these horrible things!”

“He said, ‘I’m not saying anything horrible. I just don’t think you should have a maglev train.’

“I said, ‘Well, let me tell you something ...’ ”

She chuckles now, sitting in the stately Rayburn Room off the House chamber, as she tells the story. But it wasn’t funny then.

“He was so happy to get out of the elevator,” she said.

So goes another day in the life of the lawmaker from Sin City, defending the glitzy glamour of her hometown in the button-down world of Washington.

Representing Las Vegas has always brought its challenges. Berkley remembers coming to the capital more than a decade ago as a new congresswoman and having colleagues ask her which hotel she lived in on the Strip.

But over the past several months being Las Vegas’ member in Congress has required particular skills in crisis management. The city has taken a beating in the national narrative, reemerging as the country’s icon of excess.

The public flogging began inadvertently when President Barack Obama suggested companies receiving taxpayer bailout money should not be caught partying in Vegas.

The comment opened a line of political attack that Republicans seized as they sought to discredit the $787 billion economic stimulus plan championed by Democratic leaders (read: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid).

Republicans disingenuously spun a story line that the stimulus included $8 billion for the proposed magnetic levitation train between Las Vegas and Disneyland. (Not true: The project will have to compete with a dozen or more other rail proposals.)

One Republican senator attacked federal employee conferences in the city and a Republican House member told Fox News viewers the Vegas-to-Disney train would make a pit stop at a legal brothel. (Republican Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona later conceded he had conflated two proposed rail routes in Nevada.)

The Idaho congressman Berkley argued with, Republican Rep. Mike Simpson, railed from the House floor about “billions of dollars for a sin express train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Necessary? I don’t think so.”

Berkley found it all insulting, “not just as a congressperson, but as a lifelong Nevadan.”

Berkley’s family relocated to Las Vegas, as so many do, for another shot at the American dream. She attended high school in the city and was student body president at UNLV.

“Having grown up in Las Vegas, seeing slot machines in the supermarkets is normal for me,” Berkley said. “I was very surprised when I first came to Congress and found there was a mythology about Las Vegas that was not particularly flattering.”

Berkley does not shy from promulgating that glitzy image — herself a one-woman show-stopper in Washington in sassy suits that seem to embody the Strip with Flamingo pink hues and blinking-light-like accessories.

Inside her office is a lamp replica of the “Fabulous Las Vegas” sign.

Yet as the economic downturn has hit Nevada hard and Berkley has had to engage in a serious defense of her city, has the congresswoman from Las Vegas had to tone it down?

On the night of Obama’s joint address to Congress, Berkley showed up in an improbable brown suit, prompting a few phone calls of disbelief as well as the uncomfortable question: Is this the fashion of the recession?

The congresswoman dismisses the shift in style as a packing error, the result of her having just returned from overseas, and noted her sparkling gold shoes as evidence she is still representing.

But she concedes, “I was certainly not living up to Vegas standards wearing brown. There’s a certain expectation I have to live up to.”

Despite the glossy exterior, Berkley has sought to rewrite the narrative of Las Vegas as a city of soccer teams and synagogues as Southern Nevada developed into suburban landscape like so many others across the nation.

As the city experienced phenomenal growth, she watched as Las Vegas came to be known in the capital as an American success story.

That’s why she is frustrated by the return to the Sin City image. She contacted the White House about the president’s remarks, believing she contributed to the administration’s refined statement last week that Obama “would encourage people to travel.” (The White House declined to comment to the Las Vegas Sun.)

When she was finally able to take the House floor to rebut her colleagues’ claims, she opened with: “I’m mad and I’m not going to take it any more.”

Berkley, in a dark suit draped by a velvety-plush scarf, went on to deliver a spirited defense of Las Vegas.