Being Oscar (33 page)

“You’re nuts,” I said. “He would never do anything like that. You must have heard it wrong.”

After we got through the meeting’s agenda, I asked people in the audience if they’d heard any federally elected official saying anything about trips to Las Vegas. No one had, so I thought it was just bad information. But at the end of the meeting, another reporter approached me with a transcript of what Obama had said. The president was at a town hall meeting in Indiana discussing the Wall Street bailout and got a big round of applause by using Las Vegas and the Super Bowl as whipping boys. He said the corporations that got a bailout should be more judicious with their money. Now, there was nothing wrong with saying
that. But then he added that they shouldn’t go to Las Vegas for their conventions or take their private jets to the Super Bowl. I’m reading this, and my eyes are popping out of my head.

“God damn it, he owes us an apology,” I said.

And that was the beginning of my falling out with the president of the United States. Of course, Carolyn wasn’t surprised. A few years earlier we had gone to Washington when I was being courted to run for the U.S. Senate. We went around and met a lot of the senators, and she remembered what it was like when Obama and I met.

“It was two ships passing in the night,” she said. “Neither one of you was listening to what the other was saying.”

But I didn’t have any ill will toward him. In fact, I admired his youthful political acumen. When he was running I was chosen to moderate a debate in Las Vegas during the Democratic primary. He, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton were involved. I had met Senator Clinton before. She was very bright and personable. She knew who I was by reputation, and we always had a good repartee whenever we were in each other’s company. I had never met John Edwards, but he was very cordial.

And Obama remembered me from the trip to Washington a few years earlier. The first thing he said to me after we shook hands was, “How’s that beautiful blonde wife of yours, Carolyn?”

I was impressed. He remembered the name, the blonde hair. Really extraordinary when you think of all the people he comes in contact with. So he got some political points from me that night.

He’s a great orator; I’ll give him that. He has a melodious voice, good expression, good movement. But get him off the monitors, and it’s like a screw is loose. He says things without thinking of the repercussions.

We didn’t have much contact after he was elected, but when he made that statement, I demanded an apology.

I wrote him a letter. I guess it wouldn’t be fair to say I
demanded
an apology, but I said I thought we were entitled to some type of statement from him saying that Las Vegas was a good place to come for a convention.

I never heard a word. And in the meantime, we were losing convention business. A few days after he made that statement, Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street firms he was talking about, canceled a convention at Mandalay Bay, a big casino-hotel in town. They paid a $600,000 cancellation fee and instead went to San Francisco, where it’s more expensive and where there’s nothing to do except look at that stupid bridge. State Farm Insurance did the same thing, and I think we lost 1,100 beds. Heads in beds—that’s how you measure the tourism business. It’s the life-blood of the city. This was serious; I think we lost over 340 bookings. Was it all because of the president? I can’t say. But what he said certainly added fuel to the fire.

A few months later, Obama was supposed to come out for a fundraiser on the Thursday after Memorial Day. I was invited to meet him at the airport. As mayor, I was supposed to welcome the president to the city. I didn’t want to do it.

“I’m not going,” I said to Carolyn.

“You have to go,” she said. “Decency requires it. He’s the president. When someone comes to your home, you have to greet them.”

I said no, I wasn’t going to do it. But I thought about what she said, and I decided I probably should. About that time we got a call from the White House.

“Mayor, we expect you to be at the airport,” this official said.

I didn’t like his attitude.

“I’m not coming,” I said.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“The president hurt my city, and he hasn’t done anything to rectify it.”

He asked for more details, and I told him. He said someone would get back to me. On Memorial Day, I went to the cemetery where there’s the annual commemoration for those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. By 11:30 that morning, I was home sitting in the backyard relaxing. I had made myself a big martini, and I was planning to just enjoy a quiet afternoon. I was sitting in my favorite chair, looking at my koi fish and the fountain, feeling no pain. And the phone rang.

I rushed back in the house and picked it up on the third ring.

It was Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, although he introduced himself as “Congressman Emanuel.”

It’s amazing how fast you can sober up.

“I heard you have a problem with the president,” he said.

“You bet I do,” I said. “He was completely out of line and he hurt our community.”

“What will it take for you to meet him at the airport?”

I said I wanted an apology, that I wanted him to say something like, “Las Vegas is a great place to do business and have fun.” He said he could take care of that with the speechwriters. I took him at his word and when the president arrived, I was there at the airport to greet him, to welcome him to Las Vegas.

The first thing he said to me was, “I hear you’re telling everyone I caused you to lose sixty percent of your business. What would happen if I said it’s a great place to visit?”

“I’d tell everybody you got us back eighty percent of our business,” I said. “I’ve got no problem with that.”

There was a picture in the paper the next day of him and me talking at the airport. We don’t really look like friends. The next day when he gave his speech to Nevadans, the only thing he said was, “It’s nice to be in Las Vegas.”

That was it. From where I stood, that wasn’t a retraction. He didn’t do what he or his chief of staff said he would do to right
the wrong. I’m not someone who believes in letting bygones be bygones. I was angry, and I wasn’t going to forget.

It’s funny. These guys are politicians. They give their word, and they don’t think they have to keep it. I represented people who the government said were vicious, terrible individuals; Mafia bosses, killers, gangsters. When they gave me their word, I could take it to the bank.

Who’s more honorable?

But that’s not the end of the story. About a year later, he did it again. He was speaking at some town meeting in New Hampshire. The topic was government spending and the tight economy. And here’s part of what he said:

“Responsible families don’t do their budgets the way the federal government does, right? When times are tough, you tighten your belts. You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices. It’s time your government did the same.”

I’ve got no problem with the point he made. Government has to be more responsible about the way it spends money. But why Vegas again? He had to throw us under the bus a second time.

I was livid. So were a lot of others. Harry Reid, one of our senators, demanded an apology, and got one of sorts. I’ve had my moments with Reid, especially when he was part of the Gaming Commission and putting my clients in the Black Book. But this time he did the right thing. He put out a statement chastising the president and warning him to “lay off Las Vegas and stop making it the poster child for where people shouldn’t be spending their money.”

The president responded to him, maybe because he was a senator, saying that his comments were not meant to be “anything negative about Las Vegas,” adding that “there is no place
better to have fun than Vegas, one of our country’s great destinations.”

To me it sounded like the part of the speech he forgot to give a year earlier. Those were the kind of lines I thought Rahm Emanuel was going to get a speechwriter to give Obama. But I was past the point of being placated. I was interviewed and I let it all come out. Today you can still find the video online.

“He has a real psychological hang-up about the entertainment capital of the world,” I said. “An apology won’t be acceptable this time. I don’t know where his vendetta comes from, but we’re not going to let him make his bones by lambasting Las Vegas.

“He didn’t learn his lesson the first time, but when he hurt our economy by his ill-conceived rhetoric, we didn’t think it would happen again. But now that it has, I want to assure you, when he comes back, I’ll do everything I can to give him the boot back to Washington and visit his failures back there.

“I gotta tell you this, and everybody says I shouldn’t say it, but I gotta tell you the way it is. This president is a real slow learner.”

And the next time the president came to Las Vegas, I was not at the airport to greet him.

Those comments made me a hero in town with most people, but apparently they struck a nerve with some African-Americans. A group of black clergymen demanded I apologize. They said “giving the boot” had some kind of racial connotation. I said I wasn’t going to apologize because I hadn’t said or done anything wrong.

Louis Farrakhan gave a speech at Howard University where he referred to me as the “little Jewish mayor” and said I had snubbed the president because he was black. Farrakhan is a racist pig. I despise everything he stands for. What I said had nothing to do with race. I didn’t care if the president was black,
white, green, or had polka dots. Twice he said things that hurt my city, and I wasn’t going to keep my mouth shut about it.

I don’t know of any other mayor who stood up to a president like that. He really soured me on politics and politicians, the way he handled the whole exchange. It’s so easy to just say, “I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”

What’s so hard about that? That’s the problem with politicians. Consider Sanford from South Carolina and the woman in Argentina. Clinton and his “I did not have sex with that woman.” Tell the truth and admit you made a mistake. The public is understanding—at least that’s been my experience.

The racism charge was just something drummed up by people who use it at every turn to call attention to themselves. It was an economic issue, not a racial issue. That’s another one of the problems we have in this country. You may disagree with what I say, but don’t try to make what I say something that it isn’t. You want to debate me on an issue, fine. Let’s go. I don’t care what color you are.

I think about that Rodney King question, “Can’t we all just get along?”

Maybe we can’t. I look at what’s going on in Washington today, and I’m disgusted. One of the reasons I decided not to run for the U.S. Senate was the thought of trying to deal with that. I’ve talked to a lot of senators. They say things have changed, and not for the better.

There’s no discourse, no compromise, no debate. It’s all personal now, and they really don’t like one another. That’s the situation we have, and it’s remarkable that they function at all.

As an elected official, I always took my position on any issue seriously. That’s what I was elected to do. But once in awhile, you have to take a step back, look around, and realize what life is all about. And hopefully, when you do that, you stop taking yourself too seriously.

I have licensed my persona for a restaurant in Las Vegas now, “Oscar’s Beef, Booze, and Broads,” and during last year’s presidential campaign we had two special drinks on the menu. We had the “No Bama” in honor of President Obama. It was a complicated mixed drink: two ounces of Jefferson’s 10-year-old straight rye whiskey, one and a half ounces of Canton ginger liqueur, a half ounce of Sombra, three-fourths of an ounce of lemon juice, and three-fourths of an ounce of simple syrup.

And then we had the “Romney” for Mitt Romney: tap water over ice.

After the election we discontinued the presidential drinks and started to feature “The Oscar”—four and a quarter ounces of Bombay Sapphire Gin, one jalapeno pepper, and a splash of olive juice over ice.

It’s all about choices . . . and not taking yourself too seriously.

O
ne of the things I enjoyed about being mayor was having a platform to talk about and advocate for the things I thought were important. My battles over the homeless issue were one example. I’m proud of what we accomplished, and I think we’ve begun to address that problem in a sensible and honest way. I said what I thought, and I backed it up with action.