Perfect resume, imperfect skills

J. Patrick Coolican and Steve Kanigher

Friday, Nov. 3, 2006 | 7:21 a.m.

Rep. Jim Gibbons had just won a fifth term in Congress and was considering whether to run for governor of Nevada in early 2005 when he was interviewed for the "NBC Nightly News." It was prized TV real estate, rare national exposure for the Reno Republican.

He was asked whether it was appropriate for official Washington to be having $40 million worth of corporate-backed inaugural parties, a question thought especially relevant by critics, given the Iraq war.

Gibbons' response: "Anybody who is against that obviously is a communist."

It was an act that probably would have gone over great in an officers club or corporate boardroom circa 1985, but at the time it seemed dated and downright strange.

For his fans, it was classic Gibbons: a blunt finger in the eye to the namby-pamby liberals.

To his foes, it was classic Gibbons: a boorish non sequitur.

Gibbons, 61, has a made-for-politics resume: scientist with a law degree, decorated fighter pilot, state legislator who helped pass a measure that makes it all but impossible to raise taxes in Nevada.

Still, the red-baiting episode, like many others in his career, showed that despite the perfect resume, he's just not very comfortable in the political realm.

It's quite possible he'll make a solid governor despite his wanting political acumen. But Gibbons has shown neither the retail political skills of someone like Republican Sen. John Ensign, nor the backroom deal-making and knife-fighting of Democratic Sen. Harry Reid.

Gibbons has also taken positions that have left him open to attack on all sides.

Although a reliable, 90 percent supporter of President Bush's policies, Gibbons has never had the kind of settled ideology or convictions of most of his colleagues. During the 1990s, he opposed a policy of regime change in Iraq, warning that it could lead to a protracted occupation, sectarian violence, and Iranian and Syrian manipulation.

Yet when these predictions came to pass, he remained a steadfast supporter of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, refusing to take credit for his own prescience years ago. His supporters say it's the good soldier in him.

In July, Gibbons reversed an earlier vote by voting in favor of a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. He had voted against the proposed amendment two years before - and was the only Republican House member to switch from no to yes in the two votes.

The savviest politicians talk a lot without saying anything and make votes that alienate the fewest constituents. Gibbons has a way of alienating most everyone on some issues - and he doesn't seem to mind.

For some, this makes him a refreshing anti-politician.

But to be successful as governor, Gibbons will have to build coalitions of elected officials. He must work together with Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, and presumed next Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said Pete Ernaut, a Republican consultant and lobbyist with the public affairs firm R&R Partners. They are experienced and savvy political players, and it's not clear how well Gibbons will respond in that three-way chess match.

In short, a governor can't be naive. Yet that very trait is probably his best defense against behavior described in a story in The Wall Street Journal this week, which revealed Gibbons had secured contracts for a friend and campaign benefactor.

Given Gibbons' other political foibles, he might never have thought that he was being used by Warren Trepp, a man who once sat next to arch-junk bond criminal Michael Milken in his infamous 1980s Beverly Hills trading office. The Trepp family and the Gibbons family socialized regularly, and at times, at Trepp's great expense.

"I think he feels more comfortable in a flight suit having a beer with his buddies in the Guard than he does in a suit having a glass of wine with fellow politicians," Ernaut said. "I don't think he has many close friends in politics or lobbying."

One of those Guard buddies is retired Lt. Gen. John Conaway, who as former chief of the National Guard Bureau has had plenty of contact with Capitol Hill.

He said Gibbons is smart and hardworking and that his background in mining and the military made him a fine congressman and would make him a great governor.

He noted, though, that Gibbons isn't a "backslapping politician" and said Gibbons has often refused to raise money for the Republican Party because he finds the task distasteful.

Gibbons said in a recent debate with his opponent, state Sen. Dina Titus, that he wasn't in on backroom deals in Washington.

He said it as a mark of pride, but his failure to mesh with Republican-D.C. culture probably cost him committee assignments and chairmanships, and with it, potential influence he could have wielded on behalf of Nevada.

Gibbons sought seats on the influential tax-writing Ways and Means and then the committee that spends the money, Appropriations. He was passed over.

He sought the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee, for which he was qualified and had seniority. He was passed over. (In an inexplicable political blunder, he said he wouldn't pursue the Governor's Mansion if he'd been named chairman of Intelligence, which made some Nevadans think he was treating them as "Plan B.")

Eric Herzik, a Republican political scientist at UNR and longtime Gibbons watcher, said Gibbons' discomfort with political types may have hurt his career: "I would say if he were more one of the guys, he probably would have been a committee chair."

According to Conaway, Gibbons thought he would earn the chairmanships on his talents and merits alone as a veteran with dual college degrees. It betrayed a shockingly naive view of Washington.

In Congress, Gibbons co-wrote a report that downplayed the danger of mercury, and tried to rewrite public lands law before a very public rebuke from his own party. He conceded that he had failed to create a coalition of colleagues.

For Gibbons defenders, his stiff and upright manner is evidence that he can't possibly be guilty of making a pass at a woman he didn't know, and then assaulting her when she turned him down, as Chrissy Mazzeo has recently alleged.

"When the story broke and people called D.C. and said, 'What you do you know about him?' nobody knew anything about him. Because he wasn't out networking," Herzik said.

"Compared to Reid, Gibbons just doesn't do that."

Gibbons is also not altogether comfortable in the realm of retail politics.

"Look at his academic training," Herzik said. "He's a geologist. It's science, and not humanistic. He then goes to law school, but also that can be mechanistic, and it's not the type of law where he's in front of a jury."

Dawn Gibbons, a former assemblywoman, is the natural in the family, often greeting Gibbons' constituents with hugs while her husband looks on in admiration.

Gibbons' campaign knew his strength wouldn't be interactions with voters, and in the early going, many such interactions, especially in Southern Nevada, ended badly.

Going back a decade, in fact, Gibbons has been in the habit of failing to consider the ramifications of his public statements.

He went to the well of the House in 1997 and made a speech accusing a ranger with the Bureau of Land Management of assaulting a family that had been camping in northern New Mexico: "Mr. Speaker," he bellowed, "no longer are Americans free. They are chained to the dictatorship of bureaucratic monsters."

As it turned out, the BLM was conducting a sting on the family, whose members were later convicted of larceny and lying to a grand jury.

During 2005, Gibbons made a string of political blunders in his public communications, making an off-color joke at a Rotary lunch and then plagiarizing a speech more fit for a second-rate talk radio screamer than for a governor.

This straight-from-the-hip style came under wraps during the last year, as his campaign required him to be more disciplined about his public comments.

At the same time, though, something may have changed in Gibbons himself.

Gibbons, who declined to be interviewed for this story because his campaign believes the Sun has treated him unfairly in the Mazzeo matter, seemed to understand his political shortcomings during an interview this summer.

"I've learned a lot," he told a Sun reporter. "I need to be a statesman if I'm to be governor of Nevada."

archive