Sunday, September 25, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

JOHN L. SMITH: Perkins has taken one for the team, and he's the one-man team

And you thought the wheels came off the Las Vegas Monorail fast. That's nothing compared to the flimsy Firestones that just shot off the soapbox racer known as the Richard Perkins-for-Governor campaign.

Talk about a laydown -- on the eve of his campaign kickoff. Seldom in the history of Nevada politics has a man with so much juice done so little with it.

Guys who quit this abruptly usually do so just ahead of the law, but Perkins is a police officer. From the looks of things, he didn't want to get his nose bloody in a fight he was likely to lose in the primary.

Either that, or you can believe him when he intimated he was taking one for the team in an effort to prevent a Republican victory in 2006.

Team? What team? Where are all the "team pictures" of Perkins with Democratic challenger Dina Titus or expected candidate Jim Gibson? They don't exist. Perkins' political career has been very much about Perkins.

Here's a little secret: It still is.

Perkins told reporters he believed he could win a hard-fought Democratic primary, but just wouldn't have enough money to beat Republican front-runner Jim Gibbons in a general election. Even his top adviser, Billy Vassiliadis, read from that tepid "Seinfeld" script.

Perkins has floated his interest in the governor's office for years. He raised respectable money in recent months and had the backing of Vassiliadis, Pete Ernaut and the R&R Partners image experts with all their connections to big cash on the Strip.

And they say he still couldn't compete because of money?

Obviously, they missed their calling.

They should have been comedians.

The only bigger laugh is the one about how Perkins, despite enjoying the support of two of Nevada's biggest campaign mechanics, was somehow not a creation of the state's political machine.

Cut from the Guinn-Miller DNA strand, Perkins billed himself as a conservative Democrat, but rode shotgun for Gaming Inc., pushed for big tax increases and didn't bother to hide his immense ambition. The thought that a young man with so much political drive would quit this race for the greater Democratic good is nonsense.

He had a mixed bag of success at the Legislature, and at 43 he's no scandal; but the fact is it's hard to win a governor's race after a lengthy stay in Carson City, where issues make enemies. It's something Titus and state Sen. Bob Beers, another gubernatorial hopeful, surely know.

As it is, Perkins is in position to continue in his executive post at the Henderson Police Department or accept some no-in-basket homeland security spot now that he won't be challenging Mayor Gibson in the governor's race.

Nobody's poll, not even his own, had Perkins reasonably certain of getting out of the primary, much less beating Gibbons even if he had the keys to the U.S. Mint. Vassiliadis designed a survey that took positive and negative points of each candidate and weighed the public's opinion. Perkins pushed for the largest tax increase in Nevada history and was accused of double dipping.

It's not the negatives, but a lack of positives that doomed Perkins in a competitive field. Other than wanting the job, can anyone give a reason why he deserved it?

No one can blame him for believing he could be governor. After all, he had all the right friends and was fiercely aware of how Nevada's campaign game usually works.

In a year in which a campaign could be rigged like a Tijuana dog race, Perkins could have conceivably placed first. But this season finds Sig Rogich and Jim Denton backing Gibbons, Beers rattling Republican cages, Lorraine Hunt extremely popular, Gibson showing a pulse, and Titus refusing to buckle to the well-connected men's club.

Nevada has the makings of a real race instead of a machine-bred show pony exhibition with rocking horses for competition.

No one will mistake Perkins for a "Fear Factor" finalist, but simply calling him a coward isn't accurate. In politics, discretion is the better part of survival, and valor is a photo opportunity. Perkins is a politician.

So forget about the team.

This is about Richard Perkins living to race another day on a track where he might be competitive.

John L. Smith's column appears Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0295.