C2 ez re the washington post.saturday, february 22 , 2020
niscent of children who don’t
want to make room in the sand-
box for the new kid who has
arrived on the shiniest, fanciest
bicycle they’ve ever seen.
right from the beginning,
Sanders blasted him on stop-
and-frisk, the law-enforcement
policy from Bloomberg’s time as
mayor that h as been c riticized for
targeting African Americans.
minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar
accused Bloomberg of trying to
bully her and the other two
moderates onstage, Biden and
Buttigieg, to drop out.
Buttigieg was fretful about
Bloomberg and Sanders leaving
them a ll in the dust: “most Amer-
icans don’t see where they fit if
they’ve got to choose between a
socialist who thinks that capital-
ism is the root of all evil and a
billionaire who thinks that mon-
ey ought to be the root of all
power.”
Bloomberg’s halting, widely
panned performance did little to
quell the interest of the media
horde in the spin room after the
debate. They welcome him to the
sandbox, jamming seven-deep to
listen to Howard Wolfson, a top
Bloomberg adviser, do damage
control.
While Wolfson went on, two
women with a Biden campaign
sign stood alone on the red
carpet of the spin room.
“A re you the Biden spinner?” a
lanky journo asks one of them
after nearly an hour had passed.
“Ohhhh, no. We’re waiting.
Waiting, waiting, waiting.”
When Biden’s ever-polished
spinmeisters finally arrives, the
horde mostly wants to talk about
Bloomberg and the rough treat-
ment he got onstage.
Cedric L. richmond, the Loui-
siana congressman and Biden
spinner par excellence, pounced
on that.
“I will say, ‘Welcome to the
party.’ ”
manuel.roig-
[email protected]“Donald Trump burned the
playbook, and this year the Dem-
ocrats buried the ashes. There’s
no conventional wisdom any-
more,” says Billy Vassiliadis, the
legendary Las Vegas marketing
guru whose firm developed the
Las Vegas tourism slogan, “What
happens here, stays here.”
Vassiliadis and his high-pow-
ered business friends are wor-
ried, he says, that Sanders not
only can’t be elected, but will
bust the U.S. economy with ex-
pensive government programs.
“The party is in the process of
figuring out if it is the party of
AoC [rep. Alexandria ocasio-
Cortez 0f New York], or Nancy
Pelosi [the House speaker from
California] or Barack obama. Is
it the party of Pete Buttigieg [the
former South Bend, Ind., mayor
and top-tier presidential candi-
date]?” Vassiliadis says, over
lunch at his sprawling offices at
the foot of red rock Canyon. “I
don’t think we know.”T
o get to the Democratic
debate here, you had to
wind through the smoky
windowless clatter of the Bally’s
casino, where you might forget
whether it was night or day. At
the top of one set of escalators, a
giant black X touts the “Sexy,
To pless revues,” which come in
various forms, including bur-
lesque and “Country Kick’n.”
Burlesque holds itself out as a
front-runner, having been voted
best in the city three years in a
row, we’re told.
The contest held down t he hall
was far less clear. The billionaire
candidate on the Nevada caucus
ballot (businessman To m Steyer)
was not on the debate stage; the
billionaire who is not on the
ballot (Bloomberg) was.
on the debate stage, the pres-
ence of Bloomberg, who is not
participating in the early caucus-
es and primaries, was not wel-
come. The five other candidates
greeted him in a manner remi-romero, an 18-year-old electrical
trade school student whose fami-
ly is from mexico.
But as he walks through
streets lined by humble houses,
some with cars on blocks in the
driveways and barred windows,
he doesn’t h ave to do much t o sell
his candidate. maria Beltran, an
aproned woman who interrupts
making a batch of tamales to
answer the door, declares, “Yo
soy puro Bernie,”— I’m pure Ber-
nie.
Across the street they find
another Sanders fan in Destiny
Armendariz. She’s got $9,000 in
student loans and can only keep
up with the interest payments on
that debt. Sanders, she hopes,
could make it all disappear.
Such hopes worry establish-
ment Democrats who fear Sand-
ers is unelectable in a general
election.
“I for one am increasingly
concerned that if Democrats go
ahead and nominate Senator
Sanders, we will be looking at
four more years of the crazy
Trump train on steroids,” says
Jim manley, a Democratic politi-
cal strategist who served as com-
munications director for former
senator Harry m. reid, an unpar-
alleled Nevada kingmaker.
“medicare-for-all is a political
loser, as are several of his other
grow-the-government ideas like
the Green New Deal. Trump will
have a field day with him, be-
cause no matter what some of his
supporters say, we are not, and
will never be, a socialist country.”
(reid set the political world
ablaze Thursday when he told
The Washington Post that Sand-
ers — or any other candidate —
shouldn’t be handed the nomina-
tion if he finishes first, but falls
short of the required number of
delegates.)
And so, a conundrum, a nag-
ging question, rises for Nevada
Democrats, the same facing
Democrats across the nation:
Who am I?stomping their feet. Call and
response.
“We have nothing to lose but
our chains!”
“our chains.”
“We have nothing to lose but
our chains.”
These teenagers and a few
early 20-somethings — products
of the mexican and Central
American diaspora whose fami-
lies pray the Catholic rosary —
have found a hero in a white-
haired, Brooklyn-born Jew from
Vermont who is older than some
of their grandparents. They gath-
er each afternoon — some of
them children of deportees, oth-
ers at risk of deportation them-
selves — to get their canvassing
assignments in the offices of
make the road, an immigrant
political mobilization group. The
group has endorsed Sanders,
who has been atop the polls here
in Nevada, a state with a large
Latino population that is the first
barometer of that key demo-
graphic.
Before they leave to knock on
doors, they tell their stories. The
teenage girl whose single mom
cleaned houses to make ends
met. The teenage boy who once
lived in a house with no walls in
mexico, but whose parents
named him Kevin Justin — an
homage to the American boy-
band stars Kevin richardson and
Justin Timberlake.
To them, Sanders represents a
kind of idealized future — or at
least the promise of something
approaching it — with his advo-
cacy of humane immigration pol-
icies, free health care via medi-
care-for-all, free schooling.
They look with wariness at
their television screens, fat with
paid political ads. They’ve heard
neighbors and some of their
peers opening their minds to
Bloomberg and his bottomless
pockets.
“They keep saying Bloomberg
is going to beat Trump to death
with his money,” says Ulisesand the ending of the third-
movement Scherzo w ere brawny
and grand), the rendition
seemed to be localized, proceed-
ing moment by meticulous mo-
ment, without much sense of
one moment leading into the
next.
But then, in the famous Adagi-
etto — a single, drawn-out mo-
ment, essentially — a longer
narrative finally emerged, with
an exquisitely shaped trajectory.
The momentum carried through
to the finale, and with the bal-
ance reoriented around the
strings, the thread of the music
turned long and tightly drawn, a
building chain of setup and pay-
off. The result was a rousing ride
and a pinnacled f inish. The tradi-
tional show-business catechism
instructs the performer to leave
’em wanting more. Thursday’s
concert argued for a timely real-
ization of the complete package.
[email protected]the program repeats saturday at 8
p.m. the c oncert will be streamed
live on medici.tv and the kennedy
center’s Youtube channel,
youtube.com/user/TheKennedyCenter.mantic push-and-pull, creating
an appealing, plain-
spoken rhetoric that, neverthe-
less, left the music wanting per-
oration. more than usual, one
felt the symphony’s incomplete-
ness.
for a while, one felt mahler’s
surfeit as well. The fifth sprawls
across three parts and five
movements, with numerous
jump cuts and sharp turns along
the way. His symphonies, more
than most, can tempt interpret-
ers to miss the forest for the
trees — few other composers
filled their groves with more
distractingly interesting plant-
ings — and, for three move-
ments, the performance suc-
cumbed. The playing was ac-
complished but often unbal-
anced: With trumpeter William
Gerlach and hornist Abel Perei-
ra l eading the way, t he brass was
in particularly fine form, but
also tended to take over the
discussion, even in secondary
lines. And, although there were
thrilling passages (the hymnlike
climax of the second movement
music review from c1
NSO finds narrative
ness in her voice to the woman
sitting beside her. Dad, it turns
out, suffered from cancer a few
years back in his early 80s.
“I just hope he recovers,” Lue-
beck says.
She’s talking about the recov-
ery of Biden now — not her dad.
Dad’s already gone.
Luebeck does not find it ironic
that she is wearing rose-colored
glasses.
To her left, beneath a sign that
says “Dim sum daily,” another
Biden supporter is handicapping
outcomes.
“If Bernie gets it we’re
doomed,” says Theresa “Cheech”
Yanni, who owns a business that
sells aromatherapy rice bags and
doggy bandannas.
She can’t imagine an avowed
democratic socialist winning a
national presidential election.
on the other hand, “if Bernie
doesn’t get it we’re screwed,” s he
says, fretting that the Vermont
senator’s supporters won’t vote
for whomever defeats him.
Across town, voters queue up
outside a union hall and dig each
other deeper and deeper into a
tangle of guidelines. A tall man in
a baseball cap is certain that he
can name just one candidate on
his ballot — which is essentially a
list of ranked preferences — and
leave the second and third choic-
es blank or uncommitted. A
woman in a red union T-shirt
thinks she can fill in the same
candidate’s name on each line of
her ballot.
“I’ve heard people say you can
do that,” Shannon Bilbray, a Las
Vegas consultant, says with a
shrug. “But I don’t know if you
can do that.”I
n a strip mall, half an hour
from the riot of casinos that
defines Las Vegas for outsid-
ers, the kids are chanting anddebated — and by scheduling a
rally here for the afternoon be-
fore their caucuses. As if on cue,
pigeons wearing miniature make
America Great Again hats have
been fluttering around town, re-
leased from their coops, accord-
ing to the Las Vegas review
Journal, by a shadowy Democrat-
ic-needling group that goes by
the acronym P.U.T.I.N. — Pigeons,
United to Interfere Now.
Trump has mocked the Demo-
crats for their bumbling rollout
at the Iowa caucuses on feb. 3,
when a g litchy vote-counting a pp
snarled everything, including the
results, the careers of some local
politicos and the party’s reputa-
tion. fearful of a repeat, Nevada
dumped the app company, which
also had been poised to handle
the caucuses here. Still, there has
been a lingering queasiness
among Nevada caucus volun-
teers.
on Tuesday night, the last day
of an early-voting period that has
drawn large crowds, there was no
sign o utside the caucus site at t he
Chinatown mall, a few steps from
the Harbor Palace Seafood res-
taurant, where Biden was speak-
ing. But inside the mall, with less
than an hour to go before voting
closed, a long line snaked past
vendors selling Chinese lucky
cats with perpetual-motion paws
and a foot-massage video on a
continuous loop.
“I’m worried, very worried,”
says Linda Luebeck, a Vegas
lounge singer and Biden fan who
had found herself a seat to rest on
the sidewalk.
on this warm evening, Lue-
beck is making a little breeze by
waving a paper fan bearing a
picture of Biden.
“He reminds me of my dad,”
she says with a hint of wistful-
nevada from c1
Uneasiness in Nevada
“Shakespeare in Love” and
“Pulp fiction.”
Earlier friday, the jury heard a
requested read-back from Scior-
ra’s cross-examination. Since the
jury began deliberations Tuesday,
it has a lso asked for read-back
from the testimony of actress
rosie Perez, Sciorra’s longtime
friend, who testified that Sciorra
told her decades ago via phone
conversation that she had been
raped. The jury has also request-
ed emails and read-backs related
to Haleyi’s accusation.
Weinstein’s legal team sought
to cast doubt on Sciorra’s story by
pointing out that it is nearly
30 years old, and arguing that,
like the other two accusers, Scior-
ra did not come forward to au-
thorities with a claim about
Weinstein until news reports of
his sexual misconduct were pub-
lished in october 2017.
At the conclusion of this trial,
Weinstein will face another set of
sex crimes charges in Los Ange-
les.
[email protected]kevin armstrong in new York
contributed to this report.witnesses in the trial, which be-
gan Jan. 6.
Weinstein’s lawyers argued at
trial that the women w ere seek-
ing access to the industry
through the powerful producer
of oscar-winning films such assaid in a statement, “To speculate
on the verdict now would be
premature and a mistake.” Wein-
stein, 67, has said that all sexual
encounters were consensual.
Three other women were al-
lowed to testify as supportingand Jessica mann.
The other charges in the trial
are for individual acts alleged by
Haleyi and mann. Haleyi, 42, a
former production assistant, tes-
tified that Weinstein forced an act
of oral sex on her on July 10, 2006,
at his New Yo rk apartment.
mann, 34, had a consensual five-
year relationship with Weinstein
but said he forced sex on her
twice — once in New York at a
DoubleTree Hotel on march 18,
2013, and once in Los Angeles.
(He is not being charged in the
latter case.)
The jury’s suggestion that they
are unanimous on those individu-
al mann and Haleyi charges could
mean that it is planning to con-
vict o n at least one of them. If
jurors’ unanimity on mann and
Haleyi were for acquittal, they
would presumably have to b e
unanimous on acquittal on the
predatory sexual assault charges,
since those involve endorsing
mann’s or Haleyi’s allegations —
but they are suggesting they’re
hung, not unanimous.
Still, a Weinstein spokesmanweinstein from c1Judge tells Weinstein jury to continue deliberations
Jason szenes/ePa-eFe/shutterstock
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