Horsford’s fall and his detractors’ gall

By Jon Ralston

Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2010 | 2 a.m.

I have been ruminating on what the proper reaction is to Steven Horsford’s “Money for Something and Your Access Ain’t Free” fundraising pitch. Or what the proper reaction to the reaction might be.

Bemusement? Disgust? Sadness?

I have felt all of the above in the week since the state Senate majority leader solicited up to $25,000 from prospective donors (also known as lobbyists or special interests) to become part of “Victory Leaders Membership” circles. The offer, now withdrawn, has to be one of the more spectacularly dumb ideas in recent memory, as if Horsford wanted to put a “For Sale” sign on his door while renting out his committee chairmen (apparently unaware their services, such as they are, were being offered).

What Horsford did was crass, heavy-handed and arrogant. But it takes a spectacular naiveté or a willful ignorance — and there is much more of the latter than the former in much of the reaction — not to realize this is just par for a course where membership is reserved only for a closed circle and where the entry fee for influence is often too rich for almost anyone without a Las Vegas Boulevard South address.

“My wording was too blunt,” Horsford told me in a brief interview Tuesday. Indeed, that is the salient point here: That Horsford foolishly put in stark language what has been going on in Carson City — and most state capitals and Washington, D.C., for decades. It’s a familiar perversion of Patrick Henry: “Give me money or I’ll give you legislative death.”

Horsford wouldn’t tell me who suggested the idea — “It doesn’t really matter” — but this sounds like some genius from Washington who remembers schemes such as Senate Finance Chairman Lloyd Bentsen’s breakfast club (where lobbyists paid for the privilege) coming up with this brainstorm.

It is, however, hard to take seriously all of the Louis Renaults running around, trying to keep a straight face, especially the Republicans who are just shocked, shocked Horsford would attempt such a thing.

I smiled when I read of state Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio tut-tutting about Horsford’s solicitation, suggesting his counterpart had been intimidating lobbyists not to contribute to Republicans during the campaign season. This is laugh-out-loud funny, folks.

Raggio is the anti-Horsford, but not in the way he implied. When he was majority leader, Raggio was anything but blunt. A master of finesse, he knew how to inspire fear with a carefully chosen word or two, or perhaps by using someone else to send a message.

Don’t misunderstand: I don’t suggest Raggio ever did anything unethical. But when a consummate insider, a man who served on gaming and managed care boards while being the most powerful legislator in the state for decades, expresses disdain for Horsford’s blunt instrument, I figured he must be muttering, “That young man needs to learn a little subtlety.”

Even better, state GOP Chairman Mark Amodei’s sense of outrage was comically outrageous. “We never operated that way when we were in the majority,” Amodei told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “Probably no laws were broken, but it sends a bad sign about the whole process. You need to raise money, but you don’t do that.”

This from the man who, while a state senator, auditioned for a job as the mining association’s top lobbyist and formed a political action committee with business interests he regulated. A sense of irony is always helpful, Mr. Chairman.

The point here goes beyond the incestuous nature of Nevada politics being a bipartisan abomination. Carson City is the locus, a den of iniquity where thoughtful policy and public-interest legislation often are entombed over wine at Adele’s or in the majority leader or speaker’s office, no matter what party is in control.

Favors large and small are exchanged daily during the session in a brothel that Raggio would have burned down in his days as a crusading district attorney and that one his old nemesis, Joe Conforte, would have been ashamed to oversee. Yes, some do have hearts of gold, some even try to make an honest living. But almost all realize after a session or two that unless they sell a piece of themselves, unless they lie down with the likes of those they can barely tolerate, there’s no coming back.

So spare me the wails over Horsford’s solicitation. It was immature and tone-deaf, an expensive (he says he’s returned $70,000) lesson for a promising young politician who now has to try to scrub away the tarnish.

But in Carson City, a place where outrage goes to die, Steven Horsford is simply guilty of poor execution in a game that has been played since before Bill Raggio was born.