ELKO -- At their final gubernatorial debate Friday, Republican Jim Gibbons and Democrat Dina Titus were asked whether they considered good judgment an important quality.
Titus, the state Senate minority leader, responded: "You want someone who is a leader, who is a role model, who you can trust to behave with dignity, someone that students can look up to, someone that can represent the state on the national and even international scene."
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An audible murmur went through the crowd.
Titus said after the debate that she was only answering the question honestly and was not commenting on a week-old incident involving Gibbons, a younger woman, a few glasses of wine and a parking garage.
Gibbons, a five-term congressman from Reno, said his character was formed in his childhood in Sparks.
"Good judgment is experience in the state of Nevada," Gibbons said. "Good judgment comes from also helping serve others, whether that's in the United States military, having served nearly 30 years in the United States military, defending our country, making those judgment calls as a leader. Leadership is a very important role in good judgment."
On Oct. 13, Gibbons and a campaign adviser took refuge from the rain in a crowded Las Vegas restaurant, sat down in the bar area to drink wine with two women they knew, and then were joined by two women they didn't know.
Later that night, one of the latter women, 32-year-old Chrissy Mazzeo, called 911 with the claim that Gibbons had pinned her to the wall of a parking garage and threatened her.
She withdrew the complaint the next day, saying she didn't want to be involved in a media circus.
Gibbons' account is that he walked the woman to the garage, she tripped, and he grabbed her arm to keep her from falling. The two then parted ways, with Gibbons walking to his nearby hotel, he said.
After the debate, Gibbons briefly and for the first time took questions from reporters about the incident.
Asked whether he had qualms about walking a woman who had been drinking to her car, Gibbons said he had no way of knowing that she was drunk.
"I'm not qualified to make the determination of whether you or anyone else is intoxicated," Gibbons told the Review-Journal. "I don't have a Breathalyzer. I did not know she had been drinking since 4 p.m."
Mazzeo told police that she had met a friend at the restaurant at 4:20 p.m. and that the two had ordered a couple of drinks.
Gibbons told police that Mazzeo was having trouble walking straight. But that could have been for any number of reasons, he said Friday.
"That doesn't mean she was intoxicated or drunk," he said. "It could mean a bad heel, a weakness in an ankle."
Mazzeo also claimed she stayed in the bar for about 20 more minutes before leaving and encountering Gibbons outside; a witness put the delay between the two departures at about 30 minutes. Gibbons said that wasn't the case.
"I wasn't waiting" in the parking lot, he said. "I didn't wait. That's wrong." He said Mazzeo left right after he did.
Gibbons' wife, Dawn, herself a politician, defended her husband in a separate interview.
"My husband is innocent, and I don't appreciate this nastiness," Dawn Gibbons said. "We have a wonderful marriage and a wonderful family. It's just sad when politics goes down to that level."
Asked whether she approved of her husband drinking with women he didn't know, Dawn Gibbons said she wouldn't answer the question because it was inaccurate and "mean."
Friday's debate featured many of the same questions the candidates have answered in their three previous showdowns, on topics such as helping senior citizens stay in their homes, ensuring the future of the Millennium Scholarship, whether to pipe water from White Pine County to Clark County and how to deal with violence in schools.
Given the opportunity to ask each other questions, they asked the same questions they asked in a Las Vegas debate earlier in the week. Gibbons accused Titus of having a negative attitude toward Nevada, while Titus called Gibbons a flip-flopper.
They also used many of the same lines. Gibbons tried to paint Titus as a liberal tax-and-spender -- she termed herself a "pragmatic progressive" -- while Titus tried to portray Gibbons as part of a failed Congress in Washington.
Some issues specific to rural Nevada were raised at the Elko debate, held at Great Basin College and aired only on KENV-TV, Elko's NBC affiliate.
One questioner asked whether Great Basin College should have a satellite campus in Pahrump. Gibbons said a community college was needed in Pahrump because currently students there who seek higher education have to drive 120 miles round-trip to Las Vegas, and with gasoline prices high, that might be a prohibitive obstacle.
"It's something that we should do," he said of the proposed campus.
Titus agreed but said Gibbons got his facts wrong. She said there's already a community college in Pahrump; the proposed Great Basin satellite would be a state college, one tier up from a community college.
"That's what we need," she said.
In addition to being asked about pipelines, the candidates were asked about the water needs of agriculture.
Titus said agriculture needed to be sustained.
"Certainly there needs to be growth in urban areas, but we've got to remember what made this state great," she said.
Gibbons said the state currently prioritizes domestic water needs one step up from agricultural needs, but he would make the two equal.
"As the population of this country grows, we're having to feed more and more people, and only agriculture can feed those people," he said. "We need to set a higher priority for the use of agricultural water rights in the state of Nevada."
Gibbons seemed perplexed by one line of his that drew a ripple of laughter. Rhapsodizing about attending his youngest son's recent high school graduation, even though it caused him to miss some votes in Washington, Gibbons recalled that his own father died on the day he graduated from high school and never got to see that proud moment.
As a result, Gibbons said, "I vowed never to let my children graduate from high school. Yes, it did require me to miss a series of votes."
