In 2000, I received a phone call from Gov. Kenny Guinn. I had written a column on state workers and the way politicians treat them as punching bags and he wanted to tell me he liked it.

It was one of those small things people do, but in this case I think it was more. His administration was in the throes of its research and planning for the latest state government re-organization, and such times are always trying for state workers.

Supposed efficiency experts and public administrators are underfoot in agencies, plotting the re-arrangement of working arrangements. Morale was low and anxiety high within the state workforce at that time, and Guinn was sensitive to it. His predecessor, Bob Miller, also had his staff conduct a re-organization but I never had any sense that Miller understood the misery state workers enduring during that process.

Guinn did. He was very concerned about the well-being of state workers, and he wanted to hear anything he could about how to make their lives easier during that difficult time. His respect for them was evident and eventually it was returned by them.

That was a consistent pattern in Guinn’s governorship — respect for those with whom he worked.

For instance, he had a lot of trouble adjusting to the dynamics of state government after being president of Southwest Gas, Nevada Savings, even of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Accustomed to the everything-goes-vertical style of administering those institutions, state government was difficult for him. There were legislators to be consulted and cultivated and independent executive officers elected separately from him, any of whom could on occasion be insufferable about their own shares of the process. Then there were the interest groups that had their own power.

Once he learned the system, his people skills kicked in and he engaged with other officials on a basis of respect, sometimes to an extent that surprised even those close to him.

Sharron Angle, for instance, benefited from this quality in the governor. She was a state legislator with a messianic view of herself who was often contemptuous of those with whom she disagreed. She had difficulty working with other legislators and as a result rarely accomplished anything. But during the 2005 Nevada Legislature, she worked on a bill that actually got enacted.

Most governors would probably have ignored her, and certainly Guinn had little in common with her. But he held a signing ceremony for the bill on June 6, 2005, and had himself photographed with her while he signed the measure. It didn’t gain him anything — she still opposed him — but it didn’t cost him anything to treat her with respect, either.

That philosophy could be strained, and during the battle over his tax program in 2003, he was angered at the willingness of a minority of assemblymembers to hold both houses and the state government hostage for weeks on end because their dogmatism would not allow them to believe that others might be right.

But even after such a confrontation, Guinn did not bear grudges. Unlike those who had opposed him, he did not treat his adversaries as enemies. In that sense, he was a throwback to an earlier politics, in which Republicans and Democrats co-operated and worked together. It was a powerful lesson, if only his fellow public officials had been willing to learn it.

This warmth in human relations made his staff intensely loyal to him. There was a lot of turnover in his staff, as there has been in Gov. Jim Gibbons’ staff, but the two situations are entirely different. There were mostly wet eyes among those who departed from Guinn’s staff and mostly dry ones among those who left Gibbons.

“Example is the school of mankind,” said Edmund Burke, “and they will learn at no other.”

Politics does not have to be meanspirited. Guinn gave us a gift of good example. In this age of vitriol, if we fail to learn from it, it’s our fault, not his.