01:00 AM EST on Sunday, December 18, 2005

When I think of Republican Don Carcieri's third year as governor, two events immediately spring to mind: his wife, Sue's, quadruple bypass surgery and the explosion over Guy Dufault's celebrated assertions about girlfriends, remarks that unleashed a fury and resulted in the Democratic operative's loss of clients and having to go back under his rock.

Both events riveted the state and served as a reminder that a governor, along with his family, is center stage in the political arena. His views, style, emotions, triumphs and crises are on constant display and are fodder for public discussion.

Carcieri, who is 63, catapulted to the governorship after a career in business and after spending $1.5 million of his own money in the 2002 campaign. He called himself the outsider, and now, as the 2006 election looms on the horizon, he still postures himself that way, a lonely reformer in a State House snake pit overrun by Democratic pols with angles to play. He works in the building, but, to hear him tell it, he's not, um, of the place.

He said in an interview Tuesday:

"What you find around here: Everybody's got a deal. [Chuckles.] Okay? Everybody's got something that they're keenly interested in, or whatever, and what I've found in the short time around here is if you figure out what that is, you know how to deal with that person. . . . They look at me and they say, 'What's your deal?' I don't have a deal. My only deal is I want to see this state do well. And I want to, you know, get some things done. For me, it's not a deal. It's just trying to move the state forward."

That is vintage Carcieri on his white horse. In reality, he is a skilled politician blessed with a gregarious personality, a gift for laughter, a talent for press releases and gladhanding, and a sharp sense of combat, able to run circles around Democratic legislators. He is willing to work with them when it serves his interests -- and when they're in a mood to cooperate -- and just as willing to villainize them or to veto their bills -- on childcare providers, say, or minimum wage or medical use of marijuana -- when it suits his tastes or purposes. If it suits his needs to let a bill he's not crazy about become law, he swallows and lets it become law.

When their interests converge, Carcieri and lawmakers preen. A notable 2005 example: mutual praise on the July day that Fidelity Investments announced it would bring some 1,000 new jobs to Smithfield.

When Carcieri looks back on the year, he boasts of working with the Assembly to save money by overhauling pensions for teachers and state workers. On top of getting state employees to pay part of the costs of their health coverage, he says, this is real progress in controlling the costs of government.

At the same time, he beams that the big -- and, in my mind, indecent -- expansion of video slots will allow for a phaseout, over several years, of car taxes.

Carcieri embraced the influx of new machines for Lincoln Park as part of a package to get BLB Investors to buy the facility from Wembley plc. The track was under federal indictment for, and, indeed, was later found guilty of, conspiring to bribe former House Speaker John Harwood.

I began to ask the governor last week about the fact that the line becomes increasingly blurred between the Lincoln/Newport Grand slots and a full-blown casino, which he continues to oppose.

Carcieri interjected that the Assembly had put in more machines for Newport at the "11th hour." He said, "I never had that in there. That wasn't even on the radar. . . . They added it to the BLB bill."

But, of course, he signed the bill. "Well, I signed because you're trying to get one thing accomplished. They slide something in, so either you veto the whole thing -- all right? -- and kill what I think is a good thing for Lincoln. . . ."

He said it was essential to keep Lincoln going, that a state takeover would have been impractical, and that it was necessary to give BLB the additional machines to get it to go through with the purchase from Wembley.

The fact that the new machines would provide for tax relief was important, he said. "I'm not a fan of gambling. I'm not. I don't go to them, all right? But we already had it and if we did nothing I think we would have been in a real mess."

Lincoln's new owners have launched a massive facelift and building project that includes new entertainment/dining venues. Even so, Carcieri insists the facility will still fall short of being a full-fledged casino. Okay, there's no hotel and no table games, but it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference.

Speaking of hotels, Carcieri is thrilled that the state this year sold The Westin Providence to a private developer who is adding new rooms and condos and that the Convention Center Authority finally purchased the Dunkin' Donuts Center from the City of Providence and is setting out to transform it.

The Westin sale didn't go exactly as Carcieri wanted, however. He went before the Convention Center Authority and, against the backdrop of the 1991 credit-union crisis and its aftermath, pleaded to sell the hotel to someone other than The Procaccianti Group. Only recently had company president James Procaccianti paid $6.5 million to settle a suit the state had filed over a credit-union loan; businesses related to him had left many more millions in loans unpaid.

I applaud Carcieri for sensitivity to what he called the "deep wound" the credit union collapse, caused by irresponsible loans to insiders, left in the psyche of taxpayers. But what does it say about him that he couldn't get the Convention Center Authority to heed his plea? Indeed, even one of his own appointees to the board voted against him as it went ahead and decided to sell to The Procaccianti Group.

Carcieri said last week that he is still trying to get his brain around the system: You want independent thinkers on such authorities and yet you also want to hold a governor accountable for what they do.

A president also is held accountable for things, and I wanted to hear what Carcieri, who chaired George Bush's 2004 campaign here, had to say about stewardship of the Iraq war and the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Carcieri said of the war: "It's a very tough thing. It's tough for the nation. I go to the [National Guard] deployments, I go to the returns. . . . It's a huge strain on the families and so forth. No president wants to send people into war. It's got to be the toughest, worst decision that any president would ever have to make and live with, seeing people lose their lives. I continue to feel that the stabilization of the Middle East is an important thing that needed to be done, and I felt at the time that Hussein was a loose cannon."

Carcieri said President Bush is "doing the right thing," but the war is "a mess" and the more it goes on the more tired people get of it. He said a nephew, Bill Carcieri, who's in the regular Army, was just sent there.

As for Katrina, Carcieri said emergency responses are supposed to work their way up from the local level, to the state level, to the feds. He said Katrina "overwhelmed" everybody. "Now do I think FEMA responded well? No. Do I think the locals on the ground, either the governor or the mayor, responded very well? No."

He added, "You look at 9/11 in New York and you say, 'Who was in charge of that disaster?' " Most people, he speculated, would say then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, with Gov. George Pataki also playing a role. "You didn't hear too much about FEMA or the federal response." He said Mr. Bush probably wishes he'd gone to Louisiana the day after the hurricane and said, "This is a disaster, this is what we're going to do."

But then too, Carcieri said, state officials there chafed under federal relief, taking the attitude, "We're in charge here."

Now, about the Dufault and bypass matters.

I was curious about the governor's famous angry November news conference at which he denounced Dufault's crowing to a fellow casino lobbyist -- in remarks inadvertently caught on tape and telecast -- that he had the stuff to bring Carcieri down, the names of past girlfriends. In excoriating "gutter politics," the governor also blasted the casino and labor interests he saw behind Dufault. Those interests quickly dispensed with Dufault's consulting services, and leading Democrats disassociated themselves from his tactics.

I wondered whether Carcieri had had any real expectation of scoring such a rout. But he bristled that it was not a rout, and that the suggestion that he had been unfaithful can't be fully erased. As an example of traces of the poison lingering, he fumed about a recent letter to the editor in which a man, commenting on The Providence Journal's coverage, wrote, "I don't care about with whom he may have slept."

The first lady's bypass surgery at Rhode Island Hospital was a huge story in February. The governor said last week that he and his daughters waited out the operation in a hospital office. He said food was brought in and a nurse stopped by several times to say the surgery was going fine. Still, he said, as the hours stretched on, "you're thinking, 'Is something wrong?' "

He said the nurse also sought to prepare them for what they'd encounter when the operation was over. "I've never seen so many machines, tubes," he said.

Carcieri said he prayed that day and the night before.

After the operation, Mrs. Carcieri, medicated, opened her eyes, her family around her. The governor says, "I just gave her a kiss and said we were thrilled. . . . She sort of smiled and was happy to see us."

There's nothing better than that.

M. Charles Bakst, The Journal's political columnist, can be reached by e-mail at mbakst@projo.com