Finally found a word for the governor: Insensate

By Jon Ralston

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.

Wearing a turtleneck, reading from a prepared script and ducking out before the painful stories began, Gov. Jim Gibbons sent a powerful message Monday about how seriously he is taking one of the worst health scares in American history.

I have nearly been adjectivally exhausted trying to describe a governor and his Lack of Administration as Gibbons has led us through a cavalcade of horrific missteps culminating, quite naturally, in his abominable leadership through three real crises: the budget shortfall, the housing meltdown and now the health care tragedy.

But leave it to a longtime state employee and astute observer of the political scene to provide the perfect adjective for Gibbons.

“The guy is just insensate,” this insider observed. “You can whack him on the head and whack him on the head and whack him on the head. And he still doesn’t get it.”

It’s not just that Gibbons exudes a lack of comprehension of the problem at hand, whatever that problem may be; it’s that he seems to lack any humane feeling for those affected, be they homeowners being foreclosed upon (Crisis, what crisis?) or patients being told their lives are at risk (Hey, they found only six hepatitis cases!).

I don’t expect the governor to declare he feels people’s pain. But he could at least show that he feels something and not act as if he is a robot operating according to whoever programmed him last.

This is a time when leaders show what they can do when their constituents need reassurance, steadiness, equanimity. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, reviled at the time, became a symbol of crisis leadership after 9/11. Even Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, notwithstanding his amnesia of constitutional rights he once cloaked himself in, soothed the public when he set about peremptorily shutting down the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada.

But Gibbons set the leadership-under-duress bar as low as it could go, downplaying the need for more frequent inspections while comparing health inspectors to highway patrolmen. Then he went even further, saying media “buffoonery” had exacerbated the crisis and defending the clinic’s practices.

After being informed by someone on the planet Earth how, well, insensate his remarks were, Gibbons tried to deflect from his unfathomable behavior by attacking the Board of Medical Examiners and its executive director as well as an administrator with only five months on the job at the Licensure and Certification Bureau. This would be like having hypothetically speaking the World Trade Centers felled by terrorists with no ties to Iraq, and then attacking Iraq to change the subject.

And that brings us to Monday and the governor’s brief, uninspired appearance before a legislative committee.

In his absence, Gibbons has forced the Legislature to step into the breach and Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie donned the leadership mantle Monday. Yes, some lawmakers have happily and cravenly pointed fingers while many of them have been Rip Van Winkles as Swiss cheese inspections standards and inadequately funded agencies combined to enable this toxic situation.

But what Leslie did Monday as chairwoman of the health care committee was to allow the pressure cooker building since the Feb. 27 disclosure to vent. These people needed a forum to express their fury, their agony, their disbelief. The governor, emblematically, had left the building.

No one is suggesting this crisis is the governor’s fault. Nor is anyone intimating that the Medical Examiners Board should not be put under a microscope. But Gibbons, to score easy political points, is upending a regulatory system that has allowed for recusals upon advice from the attorney general, as happened here. And it is a little tough to take preaching about conflicts from a man who hired from the subprime lending industry to regulate mortgages and who placed the head of the state’s retailers association on the Pharmacy Board. Oh, yes, he’s an expert on conflicts on state boards, all right.

All of this has to be worrisome to Gibbons’ supporters. Legislators, even key Republicans, say the governor never consults them before he acts. And unless a businessperson is a de facto member of state government (there are a few), he must be horrified by Gibbons’ performance.

(Poor Gondolier Numero Uno Sheldon Adelson. He waits a couple of decades to finally own a pet governor and it’s as if he has purchased the runt of the litter.)

It’s possible there is a good explanation for why the governor was dressed casually, declaimed like an automaton and left the hearing Monday without listening to his constituents’ angry and painful stories.

I am sure he had somewhere more important to be.