Is state Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus dead? My colleague Jon Ralston seems to think so, arguing in his column today that, short of a "miraculous makeover," Titus has no future in Nevada politics.

Apparently, however, Titus hasn’t yet received the memo. She’s quoted in the Las Vegas Sun today arguing for redistributing room tax revenue away from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor’s Authority. And she displays her trademark acerbic wit in the Review-Journal by opposing a suggestion from former U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan that Gov.-elect Jim Gibbons should get a housing allowance so he can buy a place down in Las Vegas.

"If we have extra money this session, I wouldn’t spend it for that," Titus said. "You might ask him. He said he wants to save money."

(We part ways with Titus here; Gibbons has had very bad luck staying in hotels in Las Vegas, and it may be a good investment of state money to buy him a house and keep him out of trouble.)

And let’s not forget that Titus is busy fighting a proposal by Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio — first reported by the aforementioned Ralston in his column in the Sun and FLASH e-mail newsletter — to restructure committees in the upper house to deny Democrats a majority. And also keep in mind that Titus has signaled she may run for Congress against U.S. Rep. Jon Porter in 2008. And who could forget Titus even predicted Gibbons might get indicted during his first term?

Plus, she only lost by 4 percent, a real-vote margin of just 23,418 people.

So, is a non-Extreme Political Makeover Titus dead? The answer is, not quite yet.

First, Titus can easily win re-election in two years to the 7th District seat she’s held since 1989. Democrats outnumber Republicans there by more than 13,000 active voters, and these are Titus Democrats.

That means at least six more years of bomb-throwing in the upper house, from proposals like redirecting LVCVA money (we personally would not bet on that happening) to holding Gov. Gibbons’ feet to the fire on every issue she can think of, and a few more that she hasn’t thought of just yet.

Second — and this is "dare to dream, because dreams are free" territory we’re in — what if Titus finally knocks off that last Republican she needs to become majority leader? Granted, if unethical, underhanded folk like state Sens. Barbara Cegavske and Maurice Washington can still get re-elected by Kool-Aid drinking constituents, this would be a difficult task. But who thought that state Sen. Sandra Tiffany would implode under the weight of ethics charges as she did?

But let’s be honest about what this is: guerrilla warfare, oppositional politics, eked out of whatever tools Titus can fashion. It’s not what she’s always wanted. It’s not leadership. And it’s certainly not the historical honor of being called the first female governor in Nevada history.

Right now, Titus is most probably still thinking about what might have been. She’s dreaming of another chance at Gibbons, who ran a campaign so bereft of actual ideas that his own spokesman frankly acknowledges Gibbons is still searching for his priorities. She’s thinking that, with enough money, she could boost turnout in Clark County past the pathetic 55 percent logged in the 2006 election, and she could virtually move to Reno to boost her popularity and name recognition in Washoe County, and thereby take the state without ever setting foot in rural Nevada. After all, with Gibbons so disorganized and distracted by pre-election scandal, nobody’s predicting a stellar first term.

But it’s going to be difficult for Titus to convince other people that she should get a second change. They’ll point — as Ralston did — to her high negatives. They’ll say she’s had her shot, and its time to give somebody else on the Democratic bench a chance. They’ll say that she’s a flawed candidate. They’ll say she can never win in rural parts of the state, and can’t be competitive even in areas where she’d be expected to win.  And it’s hard to argue against all of those points.

In the end, Ralston may well be right, and Titus may have to face the hard truth that she’ll never be governor of Nevada. She may well have to retreat into an elder stateswoman role, as odd as that term may be applied to the combative, feisty Titus. She may have to give up on a bid for Congress, which she probably doesn’t really want anyway. (Besides, with Porter a potential challenger to U.S. Sen. Harry Reid in 2010, Reid knows 2008 is the last chance he’ll have to return Porter to private life, and he and Titus aren’t exactly fast friends who could forge a political alliance at this late date.)

The odds are most certainly against a Titus resurrection, and they most certainly favor a final four-year term in the minority in the state Senate, fighting a battle lost on Nov. 7, 2006. (Certainly, the post-election Titus is still spoiling for a fight with Gibbons.) But with that much energy and with that much innate intelligence, even if she likely won’t ever be governor, we just can’t write Titus off entirely just yet, no matter that the odds and the experts seem to tell us we’re wrong.