Jon Ralston on the gubernatorial debate that wasn’t a debate

Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006 | 7:33 a.m.

When the only unscripted moment of the evening is a noisy dais-crashing by the Independent American candidate, you know how illuminating Monday's faux debate between Dina Titus and Jim Gibbons was.

After the IAP's gubernatorial hopeful Christopher Hansen was ushered off the stage by security, what happened next was surreal, soporific and staged.

The questions had been provided beforehand by a strange amalgam of community groups - and yet there was a rainbow coalition of panelists arrayed before Titus and Gibbons to ask these scripted questions to erect some silly facade of spontaneity. Look, everyone, there's a Hispanic, an old person, an African-American, a woman, an Asian-American and a couple of business reps who had 15 to 30 seconds of fame to ask questions the candidates knew were coming.

How ecumenical. How pretty. How pointless.

The rest was bathos.

Titus came prepared with ready, albeit annoying sound bites - "We have to look at Nevada through a kaleidoscope not a microscope." She repeated her new mantra, now seen in TV ads that Gibbons "forgot but Nevada remembers."

She mangled it a few times into syntactical cacophony - "You may have forgot" and "The congressman must have forgot." But you couldn't forget the point, as much as you may have wanted to, by the sixth intonation.

Titus also was quick to cite Gibbons votes and to retort to his answers. She strangely raised the question of her own temperament and I am sure she did come off as strident, even borderline nasty to some viewers. (As I have said before, though, most people get their news from such debates not from watching but from the news coverage, which generally was neutral.)

While Titus filled her allotted two minutes to answer with ease, Gibbons seemed to struggle to find 120 seconds of thoughts on topics from water to the budget surplus to minority representation. "The great state of Nevada" can only be used so many times. Gibbons can't seem to help his awkwardness, even when he has had time to prepare for the questions. Some examples:

"I take great pride in my vision of using our university system to advance the state of Nevada into the 21st century."

"Energy is a big part of the state."

"We have some of the best highways in the state of Nevada."

Gibbons had no intention of providing any specifics, and in that goal, he succeeded spectacularly. Unless, of course, you count as specifics hoping that every Nevada county "lives the American dream" or reminding people that he studied hydrology and "knows water from the ground up." Up to the sky, perhaps, where clouds make rain?

When he did grasp for facts, he often missed, such as when he mentioned a forthcoming report on transportation costs (Titus tartly pointed out it already had been released) or a help line for seniors (Titus helpfully advised the audience the "211 line" was one of her babies).

The asinine format, with the screened questions and restricted response times, allowed for minimal to and fro - I think that's called a "debate," folks - and thus minimal illumination.

The Titus supporters could not contain themselves in the packed Bally's ballroom, ignoring admonitions from game moderator Richard Morgan, the retiring law school dean. They booed, they cheered, they wouldn't cooperate. The Gibbons supporters were fewer and quieter - Republicans just don't know how to whoop it up like Democrats.

Debates don't alter a campaign dynamic much, especially forums such as this one with little margin for error or real interaction. If any voters who saw it haven't made up their minds, they will have to decide whether Titus' facility with facts and affinity for couplets is a sign of her intellectual alacrity and whether her slashing style, somehow heightened by her Georgia twang, is a window into her inherent snideness or something else. Those waffling voters also will have to decide whether Gibbons' platitudinous pronouncements are a sign of a lack of intellectual deftness and whether his obsession with the simple notion of keeping taxes low is Reaganesque or something else.

As for that so-called debate Monday evening, we know this: It was something else.