Leaving Las Vegas — alone

When “times are tough, you tighten your belts,” President Obama explained to a carefully screened “town hall” audience in New Hampshire on Tuesday. “You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.”

The little lecture in home economics came not quite a year after a speech at an RV factory in Elkhart, Ind., in which Mr. Obama warned bankers whose companies had received federal bailout money, “You can’t take a trip to Las Vegas or down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime.”

The irony of a president who just proposed the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world then assuming the mantle of a budget-cutter and lecturing everyday Americans on the need to “tighten their belts” did not go unnoticed.

But in Las Vegas, arguably the major American city worst hit by the current recession, people were no longer in a mood to cut the president any more slack. After the president’s previous “Don’t go to Las Vegas” warning, it turned out some federal departments and even some private corporations — including Goldman Sachs — took the president literally, blacking out the city with “No go” on their calendars, shifting meetings and conventions to other sites that were actually more costly and less convenient, but judged less likely to trigger the perception that it was “party time on the government dime.”

And now he’s done it again? Lambasting the political base of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the loyal foot soldier who’s been carrying the president’s politically toxic far-left-wing water all year, till Sen. Reid would probably now lose in a public opinion poll against “any Republican candidate not currently in jail”?

There’s no need for hysteria, here. But it’s not just a lazy verbal tic, either. The latest blast at Las Vegas was right there in Obama’s prepared remarks. According to a White House transcript, it was even expected to serve as an applause line. Yet, for some reason, the president never seems to advise against “blowing a lot of cash on a new GM car,” or “blowing a lot of cash on a Cubs game.”

Sen. Reid, who seemed reluctant to defend the city the last time, was a little quicker off the mark this week, responding in part “The President needs to lay off Las Vegas and stop making it the poster child for where people shouldn’t be spending their money.”

Later in the day, an apparently puzzled President Obama insisted, “I wasn’t saying anything negative about Las Vegas. I was making the simple point that families use vacation dollars, not college tuition money, to have fun. There is no place better to have fun than Vegas, one of our country’s great destinations.”

Yeah. At least he didn’t mention the Special Olympics.