“V”

That’s about the extent and substance of the campaign of Las Vegas mayoral aspirant Victor Chaltiel, a suddenly ubiquitous, Peter Lorre-like figure who has manifested himself as major civic figure as suddenly as if he’d been beamed down from space. His bizarre TV spots feature blissed-out supporters flashing obscene gestures and chanting “V for Victor.” His bio reveals that he’s a Harvard MBA (uh-oh), a venture capitalist (at least he’s not in private equity) and one of his startups “specializes in reducing healthcare costs by fighting fraud, waste and abuse.” (Translation: Drowning your doctor in paperwork.)

He’s also a crony of Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson, which may explain why he’s able to afford such an extensive — and expensive — media presence … although it appears highly unlikely at the present time that dollars are going to turn into votes. All King Sheldon’s horses and all his men won’t be sufficient to put this Humpty-Dumpty onto Oscar Goodman‘s soon-to-be-vacated mayoral throne. (And if I’m wrong, you’ll see me eat my words in this space.)

The mystery is why Adelson would bother with the mayoral contest at all. Sands’ casinos sit outside city lines and, except for the Adelson Educational Campus, out on the ritzy far-west side of town, he’s never seemed to give a tinker’s damn about anything happening north of Sahara Avenue.  This appears to be another grudge match with local unions and maybe a big mitzvah to an old friend. (Chaltiel’s Web site is larded with anti-union dog whistles like “simply throwing more money at the problem [education] is not the answer.”)

El Señor Sheldon, meanwhile, is promising to build 12 casinos in Spain at an overall cost of $20 billion — has the man gone barmy? — provided that the Spanish government puts a beatdown on organized labor. Ah, just like the good old days under Francisco Franco! (I wonder how this is playing in Pennsylvania, where white elephant Sands Bethlehem is untold years and hundreds of millions of dollars from completion.)

Adelson’s already stuck a thumb in the electoral pie overseas, saying maybe he’ll wait until the current Spanish government is out of power. Given the toxicity of even a de facto Adelson political endorsement of the opposition, that could be the best news of the year for José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the reviled incumbent (left). Just ask Sue Lowden, recent recipient of the Adelson Kiss of Death, who went from Anointed One to “Chicken Lady” overnight. Adelson’s Midas Touch is confined to business, it seems.

It’s certainly not like the most recent mayoral contest in North Las Vegas, a proxy war between Boyd Gaming and Station Casinos, each of which had a vested interest in thwarting northward expansion by the other. Adelson, by contrast, thinks so little of Las Vegas that he’d like to drop it from his company’s name. If he thinks the Vegas association that made him famous has “outlived its usefulness” to him (as Howard Stutz put it), perhaps he ought to scratch his stalking horse from this race.

(Fun fact: Likely also-ran Tim Gamble is a Caesars Entertainment staffer. He’s got some good, forward-thinking ideas, too.)

The Hasn’t Got a Clue Award, however, goes to self-described “dice hustler” and denture maker Abdul H. Shabazz. He makes the toothless contention that “the gaming model is not dead.” No, but walk around Downtown (as I did this morning) and it looks like an ICU ward. The Fitzgeralds hotel tower, in particular, could easily be mistaken for an abandoned building, so dilapidated is its exterior. That gaming model is quantifiably, inarguably ailing. Why does Shabazz think he’s running for the chance to preside over further diminution of the city budget? At least Chaltiel has figured that part out.