Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

They say Ne-vah-da; we say Ne-vad-a

Don't these guys do a little research before blowing into town? Or at least get their handlers to do it for them?

No presidential candidate making a speech in Chicago would pronounce Illinois with the "S" sound on the end. They wouldn't say "ArkanSAS" in downtown Little Rock when what they really mean is "Arkansaw."

So why do they keep saying Ne-vah-da instead of Ne-vaaa-da? Don't they know the name of the state rhymes with whatsa matta, not regatta?

"I suggest, when you come here looking for money and votes, it's the responsibility of your aides to prep you," said Nevada state archivist Guy Rocha, lamenting, once again, an Eastern politician so unfamiliar with the Silver State that he can't get the pronunciation down.

This time, it was presidential candidate John Kerry, who was in town Tuesday afternoon making a speech at Cadwallader Middle School.

There he was, talking about Yucca Mountain, when he said this: "This is not just a Nev-ah-da issue. This is not just about Yucca Mountain. This is about America."

Then he kept doing it, over and over: Ne-vah-da, Ne-vah-da, Ne-vah-da.

It was enough to distract from what he was trying to say.

"What you're dealing with here, these people spent their lives in the Eastern United States," said Rocha, who took some heat a few months back when he criticized President Bush, a Yale graduate, for doing the same thing.

"It goes for them all," he said. "It's not a political issue. It's just paying respect to the people who have lived here for generations."

Rocha pointed out that Sen. Joseph Leiberman and one-time presidential candidate Howard Dean pronounced it wrong when they came, too.

But they never got a chance to correct themselves. Bush did this past June, when he visited Reno.

"President Bush has been back and he learned," pointed out Chris Carr, executive director of the state Republican Party. "When he was in Reno, he said Nevaaada."

Bush, who Rocha said had likely been briefed by the state's congressional delegation, even joked about it.

"You didn't think I'd get it, did you?," he told the crowd.

By the time Kerry took the stage at a rally at the Thomas & Mack Tuesday evening he hadn't learned the lesson -- when he referred to the site of Nev-ah-da's proposed nuclear waste repository, he called it "Yooka Mountain."

Review-Journal writer Erin Neff contributed to this report.