Opinion: Gibbons never seemed comfortable in office
Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Dec. 29, 2010, Reno Gazette-Journal.
The four-year term of Jim Gibbons as governor of Nevada started quietly and out of the view of the public early on New Year’s Day in 2007 — for security purposes and to ensure that the state wouldn’t be without a chief executive, Gibbons explained.
Perhaps it was a foreshadowing of what was to come. The longtime member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Reno never quite seemed to get comfortable in the Governor’s Mansion and offer the leadership that Nevada needed after his narrow victory over Democrat Dina Titus in 2006.
The transition from working as a policymaker outside of the spotlight in Congress — one of 435 members in the House — to managing one of the fastest growing states in the union can’t be an easy one. And for a man who spent most of his career as a pilot — a skilled, highly disciplined profession in which decisions are only rarely second-guessed — it was particularly difficult to have to deal with the state’s entrenched bureaucracy and undisciplined Legislature.
It often seemed as though, having won the office he’d long sought, he wondered why he ever wanted it.