CityCenter: Can’t stop the bashing

Won’t someone please give Sharron Angle a hammer so she can go over to Aria and start smashing windows or something? (If it lets more light into that damnably dank casino floor, she’s got my vote.) The woman’s carrying a hate-on for CityCenter the size of Vdara. Like a dog with a juicy new bone, she won’t let go of her simple-minded and wholly misguided notion that every line-employee job created at CityCenter was equaled by the subtraction of a job somewhere else on the Strip. (Yes, and unicorns prance along the banks of the Truckee River.)

In the latest and whiniest permutation of her CityCenter obsession, Angle has sent a spokeswoman forth to impute that there was something untoward, nay, downright nefarious in Sen. Harry Reid‘s ringing up banks to loosen the purse strings. (Reid’s GOP colleague Sen. John Ensign did the same thing … but Angle has never let intellectual consistency stand in the way of a talking point.) By doing so, Angle is conceding Reid’s debatable contention that his dialing for dollars rescued CityCenter from bankruptcy. Way to trip over your own shoelaces, Sharron!

Angle’s peeps also blithely ignore the suppliers who rely upon CityCenter as a client. They (the Angle acolytes) would appear to be wishing an economic tsunami upon Las Vegas, with CityCenter an $8.5 billion sacrificial offering upon the altar of absolutism. The strange “What about Ely?” contortion offered in the video suggests that Clark County is being written off as unwinnable and the race will be recast as North vs. South.

Angle’s “screw CityCenter” mentality is deaf and blind to an economy in which 7,000 applicants turn out for 500 jobs at The Rio. (That’s 14 applicants per job, Ms. Angle.) Even if those positions are seasonal, they’re jobs and created by the very casino industry which Angle has attacked for not being a source of “real jobs.” Let’s not even get into the 160,000 applications for CityCenter jobs (a 13.3-to-1 ratio). Yes, the completion of CityCenter meant the loss of construction work — but those jobs are transitory by definition, unless you’re some kind of Charles Foster Kane, never finishing Xanadu, just forever revising it.

I’m sure every CityCenter employee (or occupant of a vacancy that opened elsewhere in the MGM Mirage empire) just loves being repeatedly lectured that they ought to be ought on their duffs. Running as an anti-casino candidate in Nevada is certainly a novel approach but Angle’s anti-Strip invective — even if it’s rooted in some kind of free-market ultra-purism — is making her look less of a naive eccentric and more of a tiresome scold. A good thing she’s not living in New Jersey: Gov. Chris Christie‘s vigorous last-ditch effort to save Atlantic City would cause Angle to burst a blood vessel, writhe upon the ground or start speaking in tongues.

Congratulations to Bellagio, CityCenter’s archrival, for being voted a “2010 World’s Best” award by the readers of Travel + Leisure magazine. This is the eighth time in its 10-year history that Steve Wynn‘s masterpiece has received this accolade and one can think of few (if any) Vegas resorts that are more deserving. Kudos to Bellagio’s creators and to its current owners, who have maintained it splendidly … so much so that the transition from the parts that were built under Wynn’s aegis and those that were added by MGM is wonderfully seamless, maintaining a consistent affect throughout the elegant pleasure palace.