Trumpet player recalls lesson

Politics and music have a strange way of coming together for Dennis Keating, the president of the Nye County School Board who on Saturday was scheduled to head up Hillary Clinton's 55-foot float in the Pahrump Fall Festival Parade.

As an elementary schooler in Purchase, N.Y., Keating was determined to learn to play the trumpet and get into the school band. His friend from school started showing him how to play at the local community center.

The friend was George Stephanopoulos, who would go on to be a close adviser to President Clinton and now hosts a political talk show and is chief Washington correspondent for ABC News.

Stephanopoulos was of the "do as I do" teaching school, so when Keating first auditioned for the band in fifth grade, he was informed he was playing the valves with the wrong hand, his left, in mirror-image of his mentor.

After switching hands, Keating got serious, attending Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music and playing trumpet professionally with such luminaries as Branford Marsalis and Maynard Ferguson. In 1991, he quit the touring life to settle down and raise a family, he said.

Keating now works for Clark County, presides over the school board and is considering running for the state Legislature. But he still plays from time to time, including a Louis Armstrong impression he trots out for fundraisers and variety shows. He demonstrated a remarkably accurate warble of "What a Wonderful World" over the phone.

In Saturday's parade, he was scheduled to play trumpet on Clinton's float.

Keating says he hasn't spoken to Stephanopoulos for about five years. But in August, when Clinton came to Pahrump to campaign, Keating met her before going out on stage to introduce the candidate. He mentioned the connection.

"She said she was going to see him the following week, and she would tell him she met me," Keating said.

ENSIGN HELPS BUSH

A new prescription drug fight looks to be shaping up in Congress, with Sen. John Ensign on the front line.

With backing from the White House, the Nevada Republican is working on a plan to charge higher premiums and deductibles on upper-income seniors enrolled in the Medicare prescription drug program.

The powerful AARP and some other groups that formed a coalition that got prescription drugs added to Medicare in 2003 began roiling when the news surfaced late last week.

"President Bush and Senator Ensign want Medicare to wither on the vine," said Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif. "Increasing premiums and deductibles on some seniors would further erode Medicare's social insurance status -- in which we all pay in and we all get the same benefits.

"Senator Ensign should go back to practicing medicine on animals as he was trained, not on senior citizens."

Ensign, a veterinarian, said it was a matter of fairness and getting entitlement spending under some control.

"I don't think it is right for some middle class teacher or firefighter or police officer or construction worker to have to pay for prescription drugs for wealthy seniors," he said Friday.

"The ridiculous part is that there is all this fuss over literally $10 to $20 a month for a senior making $160,000 a year or more," Ensign said. "Their houses are usually paid for, their cars are usually paid for, they don't have college to worry about."

Seniors who are single and with incomes of more than $82,000 already pay for part of Medicare doctor fees and outpatient care. The same goes for couples with incomes higher than $164,000.

Ensign wants to extend means testing for prescription drugs as well. He said he will be moving ahead with the idea when the Senate Finance Committee that he joined this year takes up Medicare bills this fall.

Ensign sponsored a similar amendment in March that got beat on the Senate floor, 52-44.

One difference now, Ensign maintained, is that Democrats are getting desperate for revenue to pay for other priorities under the Senate's "pay as you go" system.

"They are starting to realize how painful it is," he said.

At least one liberal group said it was open to the discussion.

"As long as this doesn't have an exodus of the wealthy from the program, we think having premiums established based on ability to pay makes sense," Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, told The Washington Post.

CAUCUS CHAOS

They may not yet know when their presidential nominating caucuses are going to take place, but both state political parties are going full speed ahead with their plans.

Many Republican and Democratic officials are now openly admitting that Jan. 12 is a likelier caucus date than the originally planned Jan. 19, but the party caucuses -- Nevada's first chance at the national spotlight as an early presidential contest state -- can't be definitively scheduled until officials in New Hampshire show the hand they have been playing very close to the vest.

Contest-date jockeying last week included South Carolina Democrats officially petitioning to move up to Jan. 19, as forecast in this space, while Florida Democrats filed suit against the Democratic National Committee for its stripping of delegates from the Sunshine State's Jan. 29 primary.

Michigan is still slated for a Jan. 15 primary, but speculation is rife as to whether the state, facing a budget crisis that recently shut down government, might call off the expensive extra election, or whether Democratic candidates might take themselves off the ballot to sap the contest's legitimacy.

The Miami Herald noted that the Democratic candidates, to the chagrin of Florida supporters, have pulled staff and canceled appearances in the state in honor of their pledge to Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, noting that Barack Obama's "fielding of a few questions from reporters outside one reception in Tampa led to mildly suspicious write-ups in Nevada and New Hampshire newspapers." The writer of the Nevada write-up in question prefers "huffy."

Seeing no choice but to proceed apace, last week the two Nevada parties announced they've teamed up to create a cable TV spot explaining the caucus process. A five-minute "Nevada Caucus '08" video is available on demand in Southern Nevada from Cox Communications channel 852.

Thirty-second public-service announcements directing viewers to the feature are airing on popular cable channels -- one was spotted during the Major League Baseball playoffs on TBS last week. The program claims to be the first video-on-demand public education campaign in the country.

Politically inclined baseball fans shouldn't have a problem with the Jan. 12 date, but pro football fans might. The local Las Vegas Gleaner blog noted that, unlike Jan. 19, two NFL conference championship games are scheduled for the 12th. "But then," he noted sarcastically, "Democratic caucus-goers are most likely a bunch of PBS-watching book-reading cultural elitists who hate football," so turnout probably won't suffer as a result.

Gleaner author Hugh Jackson, to his tremendous credit, is a fan of the Denver Broncos, the world's most charming football franchise.

Contact political reporter Molly Ball at mball@reviewjournal.com or (702) 387-2919.