Scandals and Missteps Dog New Nevada Governor

As Jim Gibbons campaigned for the Nevada governorship last fall, the five-term Republican congressman ricocheted from scandal to scandal and from gaffe to gaffe. When he squeaked to a narrow victory with 48 percent of the vote, he hoped to be able to focus on his legislative agenda and put his problems behind him.

Things have not turned out that way.

Since Gibbons took office, his troubles have only increased. The FBI is investigating gifts from a friend to whom Gibbons steered business while he was in Congress. In March, Gibbons revealed he had established a legal defense fund last fall, raising questions about whether he used unreported money from his campaign. And last week the Wall Street Journal reported Gibbons's wife was a consultant to a company that Gibbons helped to get a federal contract.

Meanwhile, the local press mocks the governor's apparent ignorance about his own legislative proposals.

A recent poll put Gibbons's approval rating at 29 percent, just 10 weeks after he took office. State Democrats are buzzing quietly about a recall.

"It's a fast-motion train wreck," Jon Ralston, a columnist for the Las Vegas Sun who has raised questions about Gibbons, said in an interview. "It has been a nonstop series of missteps and dumb moves by the governor since he took office."

So far, it seems not to matter to the public that charges leveled at Gibbons repeatedly fail to stick.

For instance, during last fall's nasty gubernatorial campaign, a Las Vegas cocktail waitress accused Gibbons of sexually assaulting her in a parking garage after she drank with him in a restaurant. In February the district attorney dropped the case for lack of evidence.

Gibbons has not been charged in any of the other scandals.

"If I want to be completely naive, I'd say Jim Gibbons is in the wrong place at the wrong time, again and again and again," said Eric Herzik, a political science professor at the University of Nevada at Reno and a registered Republican. "At the same time, many of these blunders then get made into these fantastic stories.

"To me, the impact is, it's distracting from his ability to govern."

Gibbons has also stumbled on policy questions large and small. The first energy policy in which he expressed interest, for example, was turning coal into liquid fuel, an experimental plan inexplicable to those who pointed out Nevada does not produce coal. Gibbons then switched gears to emphasize renewable energy sources.