Dead governor walking

After three and a half years that felt more like three centuries, Nevadans gave the pink slip to Gov. Jim Gibbons. In a fitting end to a thoroughly incompetent tenure, Midnight Jim got an ignominious drubbing — a 28-point annihilation, in fact — from his fellow GOPers, finishing closer to third place than to winner and former Nevada Gaming Commission member Brian Sandoval.

In light of the political obituaries being written, there’s relatively little left to say about this bizarre, self-obsessed and deeply misanthropic individual. (I searched “the Google” for a conservative analysis of Gibbons’ immolation but couldn’t find any. That’s how inconsequential he’d become.) Midnight Jim’s rise and fall are a cautionary tale of ambition untethered to any goal. Gibbons wanted to be governor because the office was there for the taking and, once elected, he didn’t have a clue what to do with it other than pack the administration with dubiously qualified cronies and text-message other mens’ wives on the state’s dime.

The meme of last night and the morning after is to blame Midnight Jim’s spectacular demise on his skirt-chasing antics. I’d prefer to focus on a characteristically petulant remark Gibbons made in a post-concession interview. I didn’t know I’d become governor during the greatest recession in Nevada history, he whined. (I can’t find the video online, so I’m quoting from memory.) And if he knew, then what? He wouldn’t have run? Did he imagine governance to be a cushy sinecure with no responsibilities?

Midnight Jim arrived at the apex of Nevada’s prosperity — albeit a precipitous and illusory apex, as things turned out. When revenue and everything else (except unemployment) went south, he didn’t have a clue. But he might still have pulled his chestnuts from the fire, IMO, had it not been for the Endoscopy Clinic of Southern Nevada crisis. When the reckless practices of a Gibbons crony put the public at risk, Midnight Jim froze like a deer in the headlights. (It was Mayor Oscar Goodman who shut the clinic down, as Gibbons dithered.) His patent lack of concern for the victims of the life-threatening medical disaster — he referred to increased inspections as “overkill” — was both callous and a political point of no return, as even his own party turned on him.

Despite protestations that he’s going to fade away into Cowboy Jim, ridin’ the range in Elko (cocktail waitresses, beware!), Gibbons is too solipsistic to stay out of the spotlight. He’ll probably turn up as the host of a paranoiac talk-radio show or will angle for a federal appointment. Besides, we’re stuck with him for seven more months, time enough for him to call at least two more special sessions of the Lege and for 15 additional Gibbons-related scandals to break.

He’s like the drunken lampshade-wearing party guest who refuses to leave. Lucky us.

P.S. to ex-North Las Vegas Mayor Michael Montadon, aka “that other guy” in the primary. Running as a social conservative in Nevada? Probably not a good idea.