Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

BRIAN GREENSPUN: WHERE I STAND:

Give Obama more time, but grade Gibbons now

One hundred days plus two years. Give or take an eternity.

I think I understand what all the hoopla is surrounding President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office. We started counting in this country back in the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, ever since, have been judging a new president’s accomplishments and popularity against those first days of FDR’s remarkable reign.

I especially liked the grading that CNN pundits and viewers gave to various members of the Obama Cabinet as well as the president. What I liked about it was the simplicity of the process — as in simpleminded — and the meaningless results that it encouraged. With the president and his colleagues getting mostly B’s and a few “incompletes” — the real measure of his first 100 days — the whole thing seemed a bit comical.

Think about it. We are supposed to be able to judge how well our president is doing after just a few days more than three months on issues such as global warming, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an economy in free fall and a health care bill that, when it comes due, will stagger our nation. These are the kind of issues that take years to solve and we, as usual, want to grade the results after only 100 days.

Admittedly, the activity consumes hours and hours of cable television talk show time and keeps a few million people amused — and all the while not having to listen to more about Octomom ad nauseam. But does it really do very much for those Americans who want to know how and what we are really doing to solve the mind-boggling challenges to hear what some people, who don’t know all that much, just think we are really doing? All in the name of killing time?

Thinking about the near absurdity of all this — and knowing that three or four years from now we should be in a position to better judge the quality of Obama’s leadership — I couldn’t help but focus on a more substantive judgment to be made about another elected official.

Ours!

Before it is way too late — and it may already be — Nevadans ought to take stock in their own leader’s first 100 days plus two years. The question needs to be asked: What has Gov. Jim Gibbons accomplished for the people of this state and how has he led us for the past two years?

The timeliness of the questions is made more clear as each day of the Nevada Legislature’s convening ticks toward sine die.

It is no secret that our state and, specifically, Las Vegas have taken it on the chin in a way usually reserved for places like Detroit. People are hurting like never before and bailouts are needed, whether they come from the federal government, state government or the homeowners association down the street.

The fact is that people are scared, nervous and very concerned that not only does our government not care about us but also that those we elect to lead us through these messes are fiddling around Carson City while our dreams are going up in smoke.

So, who do we have who we can look to for leadership? For creativity and imagination? For guidance and a plan to bail us out of our troubles?

Why, Jim Gibbons, of course. And what is he doing while our walls are crumbling around us, while once invincible hotels and their corporate owners are on the verge of some kind of significant change, and while small businesses throughout the state are scrambling to stay alive as they are being turned away by risk-averse and weak-kneed bankers in record numbers? Why, he’s doing nothing.

Let me rephrase that. Our governor has taken a page from former first lady Nancy Reagan’s playbook and continues to “just say no.” No to taxes, no to logic, no to creative ways to bail out our state and no to anything that even remotely suggests that new revenue might help us through this mess.

So, after two years and a 100 days or so, the voting is in and it is virtually unanimous. The governor is a failure and so are legislators who so far have failed to come up with solutions that will keep this state moving forward.

Forget about our president who has barely had the time to find his desk and who has managed, nonetheless, to make decisions that, whether right or wrong, have to be made. Forget about our president who inherited the mother of all messes from his predecessor and is doing the best anyone knows how to do. Instead, let’s focus on Nevada’s governor, who entered his Carson City office having made his own mess and who refuses to do anything about it, even to this day.

We have people being refused life-saving treatment by our public hospitals, we have mental health challenges walking our streets because our governor won’t spend the money to keep them out of harm’s way — and off the traffic medians — and we have children who can’t learn in school because we have cut and cut and cut any chance they have to succeed through education. Not to mention any of a dozen other failures to lead that have rested on or near the governor’s lap ever since he took office.

You want to grade someone? You want to play that game? How about grading Gov. Gibbons on his first two years in office?

I would say that an F is the highest mark he can achieve and he has almost reached high enough to get one.

And I am not planning to give much more to the Legislature, which has refused to fill the void created by Gibbons’ failure to lead. We have real people and real jobs and real futures that hang in the balance of a remarkably unbalanced approach to governance in Carson City. Won’t somebody please step up and try to lead? Won’t some legislator or other elected official step into the breach of public responsibility and do what we elected him or her to do?

Come on, folks. Now is the time. We can’t wait another day or another 100 days. Let your legislators and your governor know that a failing grade from you is the best way to political oblivion.

Let them know that. And let them know that oblivion is just over the horizon.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.