Bob Beers State senator who ran for governor now is working closely with Gov. Jim Gibbons

Back in August, Jim Gibbons and Bob Beers were calling each other some pretty ugly names.

Now they'd like you to forget all that.

"If I said that, I was mistaken, and I retract that," Gov. Gibbons said when asked why he was embracing a man he'd called fiscally irresponsible when the two were Republican primary competitors. "I think Bob Beers is a very smart man and a great legislator."

State Sen. Beers, R-Las Vegas, is fully onboard with Gibbons, having campaigned for Gibbons after losing the Aug. 15 primary to him. Since Gibbons was elected, Beers has been a member of the budget working group of Gibbons' sprawling transition team.

And when Gibbons was drafting his budget over the first week of January, Beers was part of a brain trust of core advisers that worked directly with the governor and budget staff to put the document together, Beers said in an interview last week.

But things were not always so rosy.

Beers attacked Gibbons from the beginning of his insurgent arch-conservative campaign, pointing to massive deficits in Washington as proof that Gibbons, a congressman, wasn't a real fiscal conservative.

Beers also ridiculed Gibbons for refusing to debate his primary opponents until just before the election and even accused him of extortion regarding a long-ago incident when Gibbons was a freshman legislator and airline pilot.

Gibbons leveled the same charge of fiscal irresponsibility back at Beers. In July, he began airing television commercials that ominously intoned, "Bob Beers now says, 'I'm for fiscal responsibility,' but his voting record tells the real truth."

Gibbons also sent out a mailer accusing Beers of misrepresenting his spending record. In debates, the two were at each other's throats.

But last week, Gibbons had a gentle tone.

"If I said that (Beers was irresponsible), I spoke out of turn," he said. "A lot of things were said during the campaign, and that is just campaigning.

"We move on after a campaign, and we're now in lock step in the interests of the state of Nevada. I'm sure Bob said a lot of things about me during the campaign, and I forgive him."

Beers also was conciliatory.

"There might be a little irony there," he said of his close work with Gibbons on the budget. He described himself as working with a "subset of the budget transition team" whose other members he declined to name. Gibbons also acknowledged that Beers was a close budget adviser.

"But as I said after the primary, when I endorsed Jim Gibbons, the primary is about the 20 percent difference; after that, it's about the 80 percent similarity," Beers said. "Once the campaign is over, you focus on making Nevada a better place. And he (Gibbons) is getting good advice."

Beers allowed that he, too, might have mischaracterized his one-time foe.

"I would not describe what I've seen (of Gibbons) so far as spendthrift inclinations," he said. "Hopefully I was wrong about him."

University of Nevada, Las Vegas political scientist David Damore said it shouldn't be so easy for politicians to slime each other without consequences.

"This is the kind of stuff that comes back to bite you in political campaigns," he said. Gibbons' apparent U-turn in his opinion of Beers "sends the message that he'd do anything to get elected."

To a layperson, such reversals breed cynicism about the political process, Damore said.

"People need to be held accountable for these kinds of statements," he said. "But to the public, politicians often appear to have a different standard for the truth."

Damore also noted that Beers' closeness to the governor indicated a change of strategy for a legislator who has in the past seemed to value making a statement more than getting something done.

"Bob Beers is becoming an establishment Republican," Damore said. "Maybe he got tired of throwing bombs and losing."