NV Gubernatorial Candidate Adam Laxalt Continues to Have a Family Problem
I live in Georgia, one of the hotbeds of the mid-term elections which are coming up in two weeks. We have some serious problems here, including a Secretary of State who has been gung-ho about voter suppression for years and just happens to be running for Governor. Oh, and most of the voters for whom he is making casting a ballot difficult probably want to vote for his opponent. Nevada Attorney General and Republican candidate for Governor has a different kind of voting problem. It’s not that people won’t vote for him, it’s that his own family won’t vote for him. Just a couple weeks after hosting a fundraiser for his opponent, Steve Sisolak, members of Laxalt’s extended family wrote an op-ed for the Reno Gazette Journal urging readers to vote against him.
Adam Laxalt
This intra-family strife, which I find both hilarious and sad simultaneously, is relevant to my interests not because Nevada is the poker capital of the world, but because Adam Laxalt, he who wants to run the show, is against online poker. In 2015 and 2016, Laxalt co-signed a letter with a few other Attorneys General in support of Sheldon Adelson’s Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA).
If you are wondering why the Attorney General of Nevada, a man who has aspirations to be the state’s chief executive, would want online poker banned – especially when Nevada has legal online poker – look no further than his ties to Adelson. Tessa Laxalt, Adam’s sister, works for lobbying firm j3 Strategies, which has frequently been hired by both Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. and his Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling (CSIG). Her company also worked on Adam’s Attorney General campaign.
In the op-ed, twelve members of Laxalt’s family lay out the case against Nevada’s Attorney General, namely that he’s a poseur and he sucks. First, the poseur:
First, for those of us who were actually raised in Nevada, it’s difficult to hear him continue to falsely claim that he was raised in Nevada or has any true connections to Nevadans. The simple fact is that while he may have been born in Reno, he left as an infant and was raised on the East Coast, 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., and moved here only in 2013, only one year later launching his political career. Aside from the occasional short visit, Adam never knew the state or its people. Perhaps if he had, he would stand for Nevada’s values rather than for those of his out-of-state donors.
The family gives an example of Adam Laxalt holding a fundraiser in which he tried to dress in a “western” style and used a tractor and hay bales as set decoration. It was a guy trying to look like a Nevadan. A big, fat, phony.
And now, some of the “he sucks” part:
Second, there is the simple question of whether Adam is qualified to head the executive branch in Nevada. His brief experience as a practicing lawyer was described as a “train wreck” by members of his own firm. His tenure in the attorney general’s office has been little more than a four-year publicity tour for his current campaign for governor — in fact, he outsourced jobs in the AG’s office to out-of-state lawyers who were given special exemptions to practice law in Nevada.
Then, with the help of his outsourced entourage, Adam proceeded to undermine, time after time, not only twice-elected Governor Brian Sandoval, but the welfare of all Nevadans. Most concerning are the ethical shortcomings that have come to light while Adam has been attorney general, and his willingness to ignore the law for self-serving political purposes. In his short time in public office, Adam has already demonstrated a servitude to donors and out-of-state interests that puts their concerns ahead of real Nevadans’.
Laxalt’s family summarizes it neatly by saying that he has “a lack of real, authentic connection to our state, and a failure to understand what is important to real Nevadans.”
With Adam, they worry about the future of the state’s public lands, healthcare, women’s reproductive rights, marriage equality, and education funding. You know, just minor things like that that have nothing to do with making people’s lives better.
The dozen members of the Laxalt clan feel that Adam is simply taking advantage of the family name (his grandfather was a popular politician and close friend of Ronald Reagan) and the only reason he returned to Nevada was to have an easier time building his political career.
“We would be proud to have a Laxalt running for office on Nov. 6, regardless of whether they were Republican or Democrat or independent, so long as we believed that they would be good for Nevada,” the family concluded. “We’re writing because we care about Nevada and because we know the truth about this candidate. We think that you should, too.”
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