Dawn of the dead?

My first reaction upon hearing that Dawn Gibbons was opening a political consulting business in 2003 was a chuckle.

Not only did her firm have the impolitic name of Politek, the assemblywoman's most recent legislative session was pretty much a primer on how to ruin a political career.

Gibbons, who appeared flighty but sweet to me in 2001, emerged as downright loopy during the taxing session of 2003. The Reno lawmaker spoke of conspiracies in such detail toward the end of the regular session that she once scooted me out of her office so she could continue an off-the-record interview at her desk on the vacant Assembly floor.

I believe she thought her office might have been bugged. Or perhaps she really did leave a shocking memo behind on her Assembly desk, which was situated in full view of the press row.

At times I wondered if the woman could hold it together. The gaming lobby certainly wondered. She was one of four Republicans in the Assembly who seemed to be a lock to support record tax increases.

At the same time, her husband, Republican Rep. Jim Gibbons, came in from Washington, D.C., declaring taxes the wrong way to go. When I interviewed both Jim and Dawn in early June as the session was winding down, she insisted she hadn't talked taxes with him and he insisted his wife wasn't pro-tax.

When I pressed Dawn Gibbons about whether her husband knew she was planning to vote for more than $800 million in new taxes, she talked about their different lives and said: "We're just different people."

Seems to me they've grown into a more dysfunctional couple in the years since her legislative career ended.

Maybe I shouldn't have scoffed at her business plan. The average person doesn't parlay a mildly successful chapel and florist business (What is it about Nevada pols who own flower shops? Mary Kincaid-Chauncey, anyone?) into a lucrative political consulting firm.

But Dawn Gibbons didn't have an average husband. And it appears from the outside that she believed she was owed something for standing by her man all those years when she was here in Nevada raising their son and he was three time zones away in Washington.

Maybe that's how she began to land real business -- not just the couple's full-employment Education First ballot initiative, but real clients.

Politek certainly got noticed. R&R Partners paid her $50,000. Apparently it was for her less-than-successful lobbying efforts on a local zoning issue, not as a thank you for supporting non-gaming business taxes to keep the heat off of R&R's big gaming clients. But more importantly, as The Wall Street Journal reported last week, she got $35,000 from Sierra Nevada Corp. at the same time her husband was working to secure millions in federal contracts for the company.

Clearly, Sierra Nevada couldn't put the congressman on the payroll. So it tossed a little cash to the wife. It has thrown a lot of dough at the Gibbons' political campaigns. It also owes at least some of its business to the infamous eTreppid, which received tens of millions of dollars worth of so-called "black budget" defense contracts.

All Dawn got out of the eTreppid deal was a high-end cruise where she rubbed shoulders with John O'Hurley, newly of Wynn Las Vegas "Spamalot" fame.

Now Jim is governor. And somehow, despite a growing litany of missteps and mistakes, Dawn and Jim are "not dead yet."

This is still Nevada, after all. This is a state where, somehow, it's OK for an official's campaign to pay a spouse's political consulting firm $93,000 (for example, Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani and her consultant husband, Gary Gray). Heck, the Gibbonses are just taking advantage of long-held tradition.

I don't know what the conversations are like in the governor's mansion these days or how that inaugural Armani gown is hanging. Remember, Dawn Gibbons paid for it with her own money.

How she earned it is anybody's guess.

Municipal primary election day

If you live in one the valley's cities, you may feel uninspired to hit the polls today. It's even hard for a Ward 1 resident, amid the noisy Lois Tarkanian-Laurie Bisch-Shawn Spanier Las Vegas City Council race, to get the urge to hit the polls today. Imagine if your biggest race is the open Municipal Court seat. (Shudder. Oh wait, that's me.)

But turnout could help determine who survives today, and more importantly, whether Nevada can survive the beginning rumbles of disbelief I'm hearing from some of the presidential campaigns about how many voters might turn out for a Jan. 19 caucus -- on either side of the aisle.

Today's abysmal turnout will only highlight those candidates' concerns and could have a significant impact on the quality, if not the quantity of trips here by presidential hopefuls.

Erin Neff's column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at (702) 387-2906, or by e-mail at eneff@reviewjournal.com.