Running all alone

Monday, July 31, 2006 | 7:23 a.m.

BEATTY - Dawn Gibbons is at the Kut-N-Korral, a beauty salon inside a double-wide trailer here, when she offhandedly tells her campaign volunteer Wendy Scarborough that she's flying Wendy up to Reno this week to help with the campaign.

"Oh my God!" Scarborough says, her eyes welling. "I love you! I can't wait to spread my sunnies and my love."

Gibbons seems surprised by the response, which is at once heartening and almost sad, not unlike the campaign she is running to replace her husband in Nevada's 2nd Congressional District.

One would think Gibbons would be the favorite in a district her husband Jim, who's running for governor, has represented since 1996. In fact, though, she is running as the less well-financed underdog to her two opponents in the Republican primary, Secretary of State Dean Heller and Assemblywoman Sharron Angle.

Gibbons has no entourage, refuses to say bad things about her opponents and seems to think she can win if voters meet her and get to know her as a woman who just wants to help people. She's running away from the aura of her husband's fighter pilot, tough-guy conservative image.

Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie echoed the comments of several Democrats who served with Gibbons during her two recent terms in the Nevada legislature. "She has a great heart and cares a great deal about issues I care about a lot, human and children-service issues. She deeply cares about people, and on a personal level is one of the most generous people I've ever met in terms of wanting to help people."

Given the nature of the Republican caucus in Washington, which is far more focused on killing terrorists and giving tax breaks than to helping women and children, it's certainly open to question what kind of congresswoman she'd be.

She's been ostracized by her own party once before, in 2003, when she supported Gov. Kenny Guinn's tax hikes. Even her husband voiced his opposition publicly.

The tax hike was necessary to improve education in Nevada, she said. "I didn't want to be in the history books as someone who turned her back on kids."

Guinn recently thanked her by endorsing her opponent, Heller. Now, Heller and Angle are attacking Gibbons for supporting the tax hike.

Gibbons, 52, seems hurt. "I'm surprised anybody even speaks to me," she says sheepishly.

The rift is deepened by the private grousing among Republicans about having the Gibbons name twice on the November ballot.

Chuck Todd, editor of The Hotline, a nonpartisan political newsletter in Washington, said history shows that voters are often resentful of a family crowding a ballot. Janet Huckabee and Cathy Keating, the wives of elected officials in Arkansas and Oklahoma, respectively, were trounced when they tried to run.

Republicans are already nervous about retaining control of Congress, and the winner of the primary will face the Democrats' best hope in years, Nevada university Regent Jill Derby, who has deep roots in northern Nevada.

Still, everywhere Gibbons goes, people know her and seem to genuinely like her. There's lots of hugs and literal hand-holding.

Perhaps it's the compelling story she can tell about herself. She left an abusive relationship back east and moved to Reno in 1974. She worked at a wedding chapel before she eventually bought it. She just finished her college degree a few years ago.

"I wasn't educated, but I was able to achieve the American dream."

She says constituency service will be her first priority. After she talks to a Korean War veteran at the Beatty senior center, she says, "If I can get that guy Medicare help, then I've been a great first lady." She's directly answering criticism from Guinn's wife, who has said being first lady is a full-time job that Gibbons should be focused on if her husband is elected governor.

Gibbons talks about securing the border, about figuring out a way to bring home our soldiers from Iraq, about limiting government regulations and taxes, but her heart doesn't seem in it when she's sounding off on these necessary ideological talking points.

She's also struggled in some settings. During a high school commencement speech in Fernley, she was trying to say everyone in a small town is like family, and instead clumsily seemed to imply that everyone in the town is inbred. This echoed press reports from northern Nevada of her at-times erratic campaign. She parted ways with her campaign manager, Jim Denton, who still works for her husband.

In many ways, in fact, despite her husband, Dawn Gibbons is out there running all alone. It is for the best, she says. "Now I can just be me."