How state Democrats are managing to look as bad as Gibbons

By Jon Ralston

Sunday, June 22, 2008 | 2:02 a.m.

If ever you question the unpredictability of politics, consider that in one day Gov. Jim Gibbons ascended from hapless leader to fiscal visionary, and legislative Democrats fell from eager partisans to neutered whiners.

After a week of sneering at Gibbons for his ill-defined call for a special session and his doomsday budget scenario, the Democrats had egg on their faces after Friday’s Economic Forum all but ratified the governor’s forecast.

Gibbons may indeed look like The Boy Who Cried Session after suddenly postponing the special gathering until Friday. But the Democrats, unable to contain their puffing about Gibbons’ attempt to distract from his myriad troubles, now have inflated the governor with all of their hot air.

Making matters worse for them, the Democrats crawled so far out on a limb when they thought they had the upper hand — declaring the pay raise deferrals dead, declaring the lieutenant governor’s tobacco money scheme dead — that they now have seen it snapped off by independent analysts who have declared a $250 million deficit.

That makes the aggregate deficit for the current biennium about $1.2 billion — or more than 17 percent of the state budget, a bona fide crisis that should have occasioned a call for a session months ago. But with a governor who may be the most unqualified captain ever to try to steer the S.S. Nevada through waters roiled by the perfect financial storm and a legislative crew happy to let the skipper take the criticism while they whimper about the cuts, no one should have confidence that a reasonable solution is at hand.

It doesn’t matter whether the five Economic Forum members were affected by an imperative to accentuate the negative for fear of any sunnier estimates being submarined by a tanking economy. They — and the governor — can be criticized for creating a self-fulfilling recession prophecy. But anyone who thinks those professionals would risk their reputations to help a governor with a 21 percent approval rating is simply living on another planet.

So the Democrats, who whisper about the forum being influenced by politics, are relegated to sounding no better than Gibbons and his fellow conspiracy theorist pal Howard Weiss, who apparently sit around at lunch wondering what evil forces in Southern Nevada and the media are plotting against the governor — it’s “Get Smart” comes to Nevada governing.

And Gibbons, who used to go to the House floor flush with encomia for Ronald Reagan, has caused many of his problems with legislators because he is The Worst Communicator. Although it’s true he said a special session was a possibility months ago, Gibbons gave no indication to lawmakers he would call one on the day before he called one. And his own flip-flopping on the pay raises — going so far a couple of weeks ago as to reiterate that he would not support repealing them — does not exactly inspire confidence.

So what now in a world where things can change in a Carson City minute?

The solution lies within a Nevada triangle where good ideas regularly disappear. The three points of this political geometry are Gibbons, Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley and Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio. History gives us no reason to have any faith in the governor’s ability to be consistent or thoughtful. The speaker was willing to make cuts — $100 million worth — but now has to figure out what to do about the other $150 million, which the pay raise postponement would just about cover. And Raggio, who has added a new word to the Nevada political lexicon by becoming “Anglized” (a reference to a caution amplified by conservative opponent Sharron Angle), has decried tax increases but wants to reach the proverbial bipartisan consensus — my guess is, so long as local governments have to ante up and the North is protected.

The biggest impediment is the lack of trust among all concerned and the inexorable reality that the primary election is less than two months away. For some reason, two decades of covering Nevada’s hubristic political system, with its toxic combination of arrogance and cowardice, regularly reminds me of Shelley’s Ozymandias — and never have the words seemed more apt:

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Such is the future that The Boy Who Cried Session and the kids who won’t take on his cut-and-cut-only mentality will leave in the desert as short-term victories are claimed at the expense of any long-term vision.