Nevada's key role in Democratic presidential nomination process

sfgate_get_fprefs();

(11-25) 04:00 Pacific Time Las Vegas --
Dan Carbone have seen the strippers, the professional dancers and the chorus girls come up and travel in his store - and today's he's watching Democratic presidential campaigner Toilet Jonathan Edwards make the same.

"Who can I inquire to acquire his butt end over here to speak about small-business problems?" said Carbone, standing in the room access of the Thriller Clothing Co., where the shows of fishing net organic structure stockings, Brazilian "butt-lifter" jeans and rhinestone-studded awheel harvests are the uniform of wild-side fashionistas here.

But the former North Carolina senator apparently wasn't in the temper to take a walking on the wild side. He shook custody and posed nearby for G-rated photographs inside the jammed delicatessen of Harrie's Bagelmania - before he was whisked away.

And Carbone, who have owned Thriller for 15 years, shook his head. Even in flourishing Vegas - with its 150 pages of Yellow Pages bodyguard advertisements - it's getting tougher to do a buck.

"There's a recession," said Carbone, watching Jonathan Edwards depart, "and cipher desires to acknowledge it."

From the Vegas strip promenades to the high desert towns, from the Wal-Mart crossroads to the fulgurant billionaire resort resorts, the urgent day-to-day concerns at place are resonating as much with Silver State electors as the warfare in Iraq.

The 2008 presidential election is fast approaching Silver State - a state that could have got a surprising influence on the political campaign for the White Person House.

Democrats have got pegged the state's caucus on Jan. Nineteen - 3rd in the 2008 batting order - in the hopes of injecting a new moral force into the primary race. The programming of an early primary and the recent CNN argument of Democratic presidential campaigners held here underline how of import Silver State and the Occident will be for the party's general election prospects.

About 40 percentage of Nevada's new occupants - estimated at 5,000 per calendar month - are coming from California. The alterations may intend a renewed political focusing on bread-and-butter issues of import to both neighbour states: water, the environment, immigration, instruction and the challenge of handling a flourishing new population.

For electors such as as William Gryphon of Pahrump, about 60 statute miles from Las Vegas, many of those issues are about close-to-home concerns that associate to quality of life and the economy.

Surrounded in his pace by ancient tools, classic cars, piece of furniture - the leftovers of the lives of folks who have got long since sold out and moved on - Griffin, a professional auctioneer, said he's about to make the same.

Griffin lamented that his state now takes the state in per capita place foreclosures, with more than than 400 a calendar month - a downpour so big that full-page ads in local document show auction bridge bargains. The place collapse have affected just about every facet of the economy.

"I've seen difficult times," said Griffin, 73, who have run his auction bridge concern and lived for decennaries in this hard-scrabble high desert town. "But nil like this, and I've been in the concern my whole life."

There are "for sale" marks dotting every block of the dry desert landscape.

"Usually, when things acquire hard, the auction bridge concern is good. I'd love to have got auctions," he said, motioning to the carefully laid out aggregation of family commodity and tools for sale around him.

But with gas terms up and place gross sales lagging, Gryphon is now, finally, also selling his place and his commodity at a pace sale. "But cipher have money," he said. "Nobody is buying."

From crossroads like Pahrump, where legalized whorehouses still operate, to sprawled "exurbs" like Laughlin to the environmental gem of Lake Tahoe, Nevada's issues and thaw pot stands for a new political dynamic. It melds the fastest-growing populations of aged and Judaic voters, a rapidly growing population of Spanish American immigrants, and a huge regular army of construction, hotel and gambling casino workers who word form the alkali of strong labour labor unions being wooed for blurbs in the presidential contest.

A new survey by the Brookings Institution proposes that in just four decades, Silver State and the Mountain West, encompassing growing urban countries such as as Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque and Denver, are poised to excel the Middle West as the country's "next heartland."

The political displacements have got already begun: Nevada's once-red Republican profile have recently atilt Democratic bluish - with Democratic electors surpassing Republicans for the first clip since 1992, surveys show. And those displacements have got sparked guess that Silver State could assist shuffling the presidential field in the Democratic primary and adjacent year's election.

Buffy Wicks, Golden State field manager for Prairie State Sen. Barack Obama's campaign, suggested as much when she sent out an pressing supplication to state grassroots militants to do their manner next door. "The most of import thing you can make to assist Barack win the Democratic nomination is to subscribe up to volunteer in Nevada," she wrote.

Edwards, speaking outside Bagelmania, where the $4.95 breakfast particular pulls day-to-day crowds of Judaic occupants and aged people worried about Sociable Security, said he sees the state to be a cardinal to the Democratic race.

"The Silver State caucus will be hugely of import to the presidential race," he said. "Whoever wins Ioway and New Hampshire will come up boom into Silver State with immense momentum."

And he noted that of the early four states in the 2008 presidential competition - Iowa, New Hampshire, Silver State and South Carolina, "Nevada represents, in many ways, issues that should be cardinal to who the adjacent president of the United States will be."

Indeed, issues related to growth, in-migration and the environment substance to electors such as as Victor Marr, 29, a member of the powerful Las Vegas-based Sheet Metal, Air, Railing and Transportation System union, who waited patiently to see Sen. Edmund Hillary Rodham Bill Clinton at a recent labor labor union blurb rally.

Marr said he do a good life - but still worries about the future, particularly his family's wellness care.

"If I wasn't in the union, I wouldn't have got it," Marr said. But it come ups at a cost: He do $60 an hr as a labor union sheet metallic element worker, but $7 an hr is deducted for wellness attention costs and more than is taken for pensions, giving him a take-home wage of $39.47 an hour.

"It's a respectable wage," Marr said, but he desires the adjacent president to assist guarantee the economic system will have got the sort of occupations he can happen to back up his wife, Terralyn, 28, and his 4-month-old daughter, Feliciti, who kips in her "Hillary for President" decorated babe stroller.

Back at the Vegas Thriller store, Crick Weinstein, 60, is mulling his future, too.

Weinstein have been a chemin de fer trader at Caesars Palace for decennaries - a labor union occupation that's "always been the best occupation in town," he said. It lets him to drive a reddish Corvette and unrecorded in the city's artsy historical district.

But his hand, too, is changing: Crime is up - his place have been robbed twice. Big vacation spots are consolidating under a few powerful proprietors and little - and sexier - workers are getting hired.

The concerns are echoed in Pahrump by Saginaw Grant, 73, an older in the Sac-n-Fox and Otoe-Missouria Nations and a fictional character histrion who have appeared in tons of movies and television shows. Grant spoke in the rose-colored freshness of the scene sun at the local community center, where American North American Indian work force gathered around the beat to sing ancient chants and songs and professional dancers readied for a traditional powwow.

Grant motioned at the crowd, his chiseled human face marked with worry.

In the Republic Of Iraq war, he said, "it was a Native (American) adult female who was the first casualty," and other immature American Indians were recruited by the military and have got died in the conflict.

Among those who stay at home, on reserves and in cities, their instruction and wellness attention necessitates are not being met, Grant said.

"We don't necessitate money on the reservation; we necessitate investment," especially jobs, he said.

Meanwhile, the politicians railing about illegal in-migration - and the sarcasm is not lost on Indians who inhabited these lands long before the achromatic man, he said.

"Don't acquire me started," Grant said with a wry smile. "It fires me up when they desire to criticise person who desires to come up to this state to work ... and we are treated as immigrants."

Down the route in Dirty Laundry - the machine-controlled wash owned by former Film Industry dame Heidi Fleiss - Brad Goans, 59, quietly folded his clothing and admitted he worries about the future.

The Vietnam-era veteran, who dwells in rural district 40 statute miles from this hamlet, said he inquires whether the Democrats will really work out what he states is a messiness created by Republicans.

"This warfare is going to interrupt this state financially," said Goans, a former Navy pigboat staff member who is on disability. "The Democrats are blowing it, because they're not strong adequate on the warfare - and now Shrub desires to begin one in Iran."

Dawn Rupert, 60, is taking clothing from a drier nearby. "They're all full of B.S. They acquire elected, and they conveniently bury what they promise," she said.

Rupert is glad she moved to Nevada, where a senior wellness program acquires her in the door of her doctor's business office for $10 per visit and her prescriptions are $30.

"But what about the kids?" states the female parent of three, grandma of five and great-grandmother of two. "What's going to be there for them?"

E-mail Carla Marinucci at .