The Presidential Suite

Not surprisingly, Caesars Palace is making the most of Obama: The Las Vegas Spectacular, the star-studded fundraiser for Harry Reid involving a host of Harrah's-related celebrities. They've just distributed this photo of the suite where the president rested his precious head last night and issued this press release, posted here in full...

Hail to The Chief At Caesars Palace...

LAS VEGAS (May 27, 2009) - While President Barack Obama was in Las Vegas for a sold-out fundraiser, he once again chose Caesars Palace as his resort of choice.

Having been a frequent guest of the hotel during his campaign, President Obama noted to the audience, "I thought I had a pretty nice room," he said. "But now I'm president, they upgraded me. It's a really nice room now."

Nice it is—the 22,000 square foot suite in the newly renovated Forum Tower offers unparalleled views of the Las Vegas Strip and offers and exterior patio with private pool. Always one to stay in shape, the President made sure to make a visit to the renowned Qua Baths & Spa for a workout and was spotted shaking hands and thanking the Caesars staff along the way. He also made a special surprise visit to room service to thank the staff.

At the fundraiser, Bette Midler (who like President Obama grew up in Hawaii) gave President Obama a Ukulele for his daughters, Sasha and Malia.

One odd thing here: How did the President get in and out of Caesars, including hanging out at Qua, without someone getting a camphone shot of him? I haven't seen anything today on the blogs or YouTube other than those podium shots on the Colosseum stage, which by the way, actually manage to make the most regal showroom in Vegas look boring. How come there are no photos of any of these celebrities with Obama, card dealers with Obama, gay cruisy guys at the spa with Obama?

Obama coins new Vegas slogan!

President Obama is presently doing some politicking at a Nellis-area solar panel factory following a night of partying for Harry Reid at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace with an all-Harrah's/AEG celebrity lineup (Bette, Rita Rudner, Sheryl Crow, ex-Harrah's headliner Clint Holmes). That may explain the absence at Obama: The Las Vegas Spectacular of any Cirque performers or at least that noted Obamatic Terry Fator. Har har.

Anywho, Jon Ralston just reported via e-mail that The One is believed to have uttered: "Nothing like a quick trip to Vegas."

I don't think that remark is going to quell the folks who want to pretend the President told the nation not to do business travel here when he clearly did not and it's only a matter of time before Hannity and Limbaugh lampoon the mustard-eating Socialist for saying "nothinG" and not "nothin'" like real 'Mericans would.

Still, it does have a ring to it. So here's a free suggestion to R&R Partners and the LVCVA: Grab the audio of that statement and start cranking out new TV and radio ads with that familiar dulcet voice beckoning: "Nothing like a quick trip to Vegas."

Hey, it's less than "What happens here stays here" but a heckuva lot more than "Vegas Right Now." All they need is for Caesars to put up a marquee in those iconic red block letters that reads: "Obama Slept Here." The Vegas comeback begins!

[Update: The White House transcript of Obama's remarks today indicate the whole quote was: "You know, it's always a pleasure to get out of Washington a little bit. Washington is okay, but it's nice taking some time to talk to Americans of every walk of life outside of the nation's capital. And there's nothing like a quick trip to Vegas in the middle of the week. (Applause.) Like millions of other Americans, we come to this beautiful city for the sights and for the sounds -- and today we come for the sun." That led him into his solar power push.]

Adelson Wishes He'd Fired Weidner Sooner

I had an extremely brief -- maybe 10-minute -- interview Friday evening with Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson as I prepared my New York Times piece on the opening of the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem. But gosh, what a 10-minute interview. He talked up the Bethlehem property, of course, but he also wandered into areas I hadn't even planned to discuss.

Most importantly, he was fresh off the plane from Macau and said he believes he may have the financing in place to restart construction of the resorts on the Cotai Strip and the hotel and shopping at the Bethlehem site by the end of 2009. With the Times' blessing -- owing to a shrinking business-section freelance budget -- I did an Agence France-Presse wire service story about this development.

Ah, but there was more. In March, longtime top lieutenant William Weidner, the chief operating officer, left the company. He says he quit; Adelson has said he fired him. This culminated an epic internal struggle against the backdrop of LVS' stock freefalling from an October 2007 high of $148 to a low of less than $2 earlier this year.

I asked Adelson whether he would have done anything differently in the past year or so and this was his wallop of an answer:

"Would I have done anything different? Yes, I would’ve fired Bill Weidner a long time ago. He created a financing situation that was completely inappropriate. Now we’re getting financing that’s more appropriate. What I’d like to say, unequivocally, is it’s not a matter of the [Macau] market. The market is good, very good. You cannot change the culture of Chinese people and their love to challenge luck. If there’s some bumps in the road in terms of everything going 100 percent perfect. Our numbers have been going up and the [Macau peninsula, where casinos have long clustered and now include Sands Macao, Wynn Macau and MGM Mirage Macau] have been going down. [The Cotai Strip is] standing out as a separate must-see attraction in the city of Macau."

Before I could even ask another question, Adelson was off and running again. Steve Wynn has lambasted LVS in Asia and MGM Mirage on the Strip, particularly on Jon Ralston's TV show, for overambitious plans that lacked proper financing. Adelson battled back on that one:

"I wish I had accelerated the construction [in Macau], not cut down on it. I hear that our competitors like Steve Wynn fault us by saying, 'Oh they went too far, too fast, and they never should have built so much.' In the meantime, what’s the bottom line of our company versus other companies? Even in the economic tsunami that we’re experiencing, we’re still doing better than other companies on a proportional basis. Much better."

It's hard to know exactly what he means here, but thanks to Hunter Hillegas at RateVegas.Com for providing me with some data from recent SEC filings for comparison's sake. He found that the Wynn Macau and Sands Macao had average daily room rates in the first quarter of 2009 of $268, higher than the $216 garnered by the Venetian Macao, which is Cotai. As for the revenue per room in the same period, Sands Macao got $260, Wynn Macau got $223 and Venetian Macao got $216. So on both measures, Adelson's own property on the Macau peninsula was doing better than his property on Cotai. In Vegas, Wynn-Encore got an average rate of $222, higher than Venetian's $209 and Palazzo's $221. So it's pretty close on that front but it's hard to see how Adelson claims a clear victory in any of these markets.

Adelson did say that the one project he does not expect to restart by year's end are the St. Regis luxury condos on the Strip that now stand half-built. Yet he said that could happen, too, if he can create a situation where the developer is also the lender so the buyers can get the credit to close that banks are reluctant to provide. (Photo left by Isaac Brekken for my NYT piece in March on the Vegas condo market.)

I asked Bill Lerner, the ex-Deutsche Bank gaming analyst who now has his own firm called Union Gaming Group, about this notion. He said it's not farfetched and he expects MGM Mirage to do the same with some of their condos at CityCenter.

"I think we’ll see that with some of the residential development in the Strip corridor where the protects are built or nearly built. The operator/developer will structure seller financing. Where’s the downside? If they move ahead and do something like that, it allows them to close and collect interest payments. It’s the best alternative given the current set of circumstances."

Lerner, incidentally, is quoted in my AFP piece speculating that LVS will sell off some assets or take on equity-sharing partners to finish the stalled projects.

Finally, Adelson again defended his approach and he brought up the fact that he put $1 billion of his own money into the company to keep it afloat.

"Unless somebody thinks completely ignorant of the facts, I think I made an educated and informed investment decision that was a good decision on our part that saved our company and now we live to fight another day. I took $1 billion out of my family’s piggy bank. How many people would do that?"

Not ever having that kind of wealth, I honestly cannot say.

The Strip is LIVE tonight w/Carlos Santana

We're finally airing our chat with Carlos Santana this week as he begins his first set of his 36-concert-a-year gig at the Hard Rock Hotel's new Joint venue. Plus, we'll discuss some explosive remarks from my interview last week with Sheldon Adelson and we've got plenty of banter about everyone from Adam Lambert to Pansy Ho.

As always, join us at 6:45ish p.m. PT at LVRocks.Com to hear the live show or grab the podcast edition when it's posted by Thursday morning. Subscribe (it's free!) in iTunes.

Breaking: People Lose Stuff At Casinos!

Sorry to keep going with the Bethlehem stuff, but this is too funny not to share. The Express-News in Bethlehem, Pa., where Las Vegas Sands opened a 3,000-slot casino on Friday, had this headline atop a report on their website on Saturday:

"Easy ways to stay safe at Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem;
two patrons report missing wallets"

We then learn that two women lost their wallets on opening day. One bought some food and then couldn't find it. She lost $220 she probably wouldn't have gone home with anyhow. The other lady admits she left it on a slot machine and when she returned for it, it was gone.

Now, I feel for these women. I do. I'm on record as being a total loser. But! If the lady had left her wallet on a table at Wendy's and came back to find it gone, would this be worth reporting in the newspaper? Would all fast-food joints and Dave Thomas himself be guilty by association? The intrepid journalist here offered up some surefire ways to avoid this fate, courtesy of About.Com. The experts apparently recommend you, uh, keep track of your shit. Stop the presses!

Of course, casino-hating commenters blamed the casino. Among the remarks:

Casinos are a robber's paradise. Wherelse can you find half-looped careless people loaded with money who don't pay attention to anything other than the rotating fruit on the machine in front of them?

You have to expect this kind of behavior in a house of gambling. Thefts like these happen in Vegas and AC and anywhere you have casinos, its just going to happen. I was wondering how long after the doors were opened on Friday it would be before we'd see an action like this reported.

Look at the dempgraphic [sic] that feeds these places!! Old people, mostly women, widowed women who are desparetly [sic] trying to spend all of their husbands hard earned money. Money he earned working weekends and holidays to provide for this blue haired biotch that sat home made dinner and did the laundry.

Yikes, huh?

Unions Heart Sands and Sheldon!

No, your eyes do not deceive you. Despite Las Vegas Sands and CEO Sheldon Adelson in particular being seen as Public Enemy No. 1 by the unions in Las Vegas, this was a full-page ad in the Express-Times in Bethlehem on Friday celebrating the opening of the casino there. (I had to scan in three parts and piece it together).

I asked LVS spokesman Ron Reese about this odd turn of events. He proudly reported that the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem is "100 percent union built."

He said they used "some" union labor for building the hotels in Las Vegas. But he had a grin on his face that told me I was not wrong to find this all quite ironic. It was only earlier this month that litigation between LVS and the Culinary 226 in Las Vegas over issues related to the opening of Venetian in 1999 were finally fully ended. The Venetian-Palazzo is the largest non-union shop on the Strip and the halls of the Culinary's downtown offices are adorned with photos of massive protests against Adelson. I want to say there's even photos of people holding pickets in which Adelson has the devil's horns on him.

Yet in the Keystone State, they're 100 percent union built and proud of it! (The service workers are not union, though.) Not only that, but the company spent $743 million to build a casino in a jurisdiction where they'll have to hand over 55 percent of the gaming revenue to the state!?!

What does Bethlehem and Harrisburg have that Vegas and Carson City don't? Anyone?

Sands Bethlehem Pictorial 3: The Quirk

As always, there were other odds and ends from my exposure to Bethlehem and the Sands Bethlehem casino there to share. This, above, was among those, the fact that they charge $7 -- and I heard people said things like, "Oh, that's a lucky number" -- for valet parking. The only hotel that charges for valet parking in Vegas that I know of is the Four Seasons.

Let's see...what else. Well, I found it a bit shocking that Las Vegas Sands would build a casino in a jurisdiction where the state takes a 55 percent share of the gaming revenue. Did you people in Carson City trying to find a few more sheckels between the cushions hear that? LVS thinks it's worth it to spend $743 million to build a thing where they'll get 45 percent of the revenue!

Hey, remember that big crane with the Sands logo on it? Well, look at what they've got attached to it:


This was what is known as a very, very soft opening. Besides the fact that they didn't have the hotel or mall ready -- and won't for more than a year -- the belly-up bar (as Hunter and Mike E call the central-casino bars) didn't even have matchbooks. So I was reduced to doing this for a souvenir:


They had a gift shop called Sands & Co., I think, which is a strange name. I did pick up a couple of T-shirts, a mug and a shotglass I plan to sell off to support the show for $30 or more. Something in the gift shop I did NOT buy:


As you can tell from my other posts as well as my radio, podcast and newspaper work on this story, these folks are very proud of their steel heritage. So proud, in fact, that when Mayor John Callahan took me to another part of the city to see a redevelopment project, I spotted this mural on the wall of a gym:


I also thought it was cute that Bethlehem's non-steel-related nickname is the Christmas City. People mail their mail there in December to get special Christmas-related stamps. Here's some:


Back at the casino, it was also interesting that there are designated nonsmoking areas such as this. That's what that yellow sign says.


You might recall from a recent post here that not only do none of the Vegas joints offer such a thing to my knowledge, but at the Palazzo (owned by LVS, natch) this sign stands in the casino...


...without giving any indication of where said corridor is.

Of course, I loved checking out the Express-Times, the local paper, as they celebrated and reported this opening. Here's the cover of the Exposed section, the Friday entertainment section:



Of course, everything is overdone with gambling cliches. The front-page headline, for instance, was "Today, all bets are on," for instance. That piece included some advice from Michael Bluejay of VegasClick.Com on how to beat the slots. His answer, essentially: You can't.

They might as well learn sooner than later, huh?