Special session: Mission accomplished!

So Sunday evening rolls around and I sit down to watch Gov. Jim Gibbons and Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley give their dueling live television addresses regarding the Nevada's budget crisis. Instead of watching the governor bumble for 10 minutes with a retort by Buckley, my screen was filled with promises that I could buy a home for $187.24 with no monthly payments.

I thought at least the governor and speaker had finally got a plan to deal with the state's foreclosure problem until I noticed that the man was too polished to be the governor and the woman was blond. Instead, either Jim Rogers was preempting the governor or the local NBC affiliate was running an infomercial that amazingly enough captured the state's budget/taxes philosophy (something for nothing; I mean nothing, look at that, a three bedroom bungalow for $595.02 and no payments; just the way Nevada used to be before all the service-demanding Californians invaded!) and not the eagerly anticipated News 3 Special Report: Governor Jim Gibbons Address.

Of course, it was yet another of the governor's late Friday afternoon decisions; this time to push the Legislative Special Session back until next Friday that rendered the need for a television appearance moot. So after a week of backtracking and flip-flopping about the need for a Special Session and what would or would not be on the chopping block, as much as it pains me to say it, it looks like the governor has successfully carved out some wiggle room for himself and his embattled administration.

The agreement between him and Dawn to keep their personal business just that has eliminated the bi-weekly sympathetic/aggrieved wife as victim media onslaught.

The promotion of the Special Session and failure of the media, not from a want of looking I assume, to uncover any further evidence of cuckholding at the highest levels has taken textgate off the front pages. The governor even went on to show real chutzpah by characterizing those that suggested any attempt to use the Special Session as a ruse to move attention away from his various headline grabbing marriage related catastrophes as "morons."

With the media now at arm's length, the governor next pushed his opponents, the government loving, public employee protecting, Assembly Democrats back on to their heals. The Democrats, after fighting tooth and nail against anything that would require them to make a difficult decision so close to what should be a favorable election, hoped to center the budget debate on a $90 million figure and then split the difference with the Governor and his Senate brethren. Instead, the Economic Forum (is this just another Nevada quirk or is there any place else where hand picked business executives have so much unchecked influence on policy making?) weighed in with even more ominous predictions for the state's finances than the Governor's Office.

Being insured that the game will be played on the Governor's terms means that unless the Democrats can quickly counter frame the budget debate or cobble together a veto proof coalition to pass a tax bill, the storyline (being regularly fanned by the Review Journal where the line between editorial and news becomes murkier by the day) for the Special Session will be raises for teachers and state employees versus layoffs; a no win proposition for Buckley and company (or me).

While the necessity of the Special Session is still debatable given, as many have noted, that Gibbons more-or-less unilaterally gutted nearly a $1 billion this spring from the budget, his decision to seek bipartisan coverage now is shaping up to be a rather shrewd move (and yes, this may be the first time that shrewd and Jim Gibbons have been used in the same sentence). The first round dismantling of the budget meant that the governor was able to exercise his unique brand of political leadership, while axing the less politically sensitive parts of the budget. Now all that is left to gut are the nitty gritty of government operations and their accompanying entrenched constituencies.

And by not offering any agenda to organize the Session allows Gibbons to appear to the public that he is managing the crisis while really passing the buck to the Legislature; all the while knowing that in the end the Democrats are going to have to move closer to his position given that there is no chance that the Senate Republicans will agree to a veto proof broad based business tax this close to the primaries.

Not a bad rebound for a guy with approval ratings in the low 20s and who was quickly becoming a national joke. It appears that Gibbons did learn a thing or two from George Bush after all: The value of low expectations and how to exploit a crisis for political advantage.

David Damore is a political scientist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.