Gov. Angus King’s meditation released Tuesday, called The Maine Agenda, is part self-assessment of his time in office, part vision of his planned next term and part campaign brochure. Mostly, however, it is a particularly useful document to help voters form their own agendas.

Not that they need to follow the governor’s outline, but his agenda could be a launching point for thinking about how the candidates approach the job; whether Jim Longley’s or Bill Clarke’s proposed tax cuts make more or less sense than Tom Connolly’s economic-growth plan, or whether the governor’s environmental positions are more or less effective than Pat LaMarche’s. In a low-budget campaign like this one, the best way to find something out is to ask.

The governor lists three broad areas for discussion: education, economy and environment. That covers a lot of ground but hardly is everything. (The rising cost of health care, for instance, or the way social services are delivered or crime and punishment all would make good subjects by themselves.) But consider just one part of the governor’s agenda as an example.

On education, the governor has been notably reluctant to increase school funding, even if that meant merely letting it stay even with inflation. But he also oversaw and encouraged Learning Results, an ambitious attempt to raise standards and measure learning in school systems. He accurately sees a return of battles over the school-funding formula, when schools with losing populations can no longer find any place to cut.

His larger agenda is over higher education, where, the governor says, “I propose a comprehensive restructuring … with a view toward increasing access, enrollment and retention; lowering costs; minimizing redundancy and creating a seamless system in which students can enter at any point and move as far and as fast as their interests and skills can take them.” Any number of able state leaders have been overwehelmed by trying to restructure the University of Maine System, but that doesn’t mean the governor is wrong to try. It does mean that he can expect to spend long days trudging from campus to campus explaining his plans to hostile administration and faculty.

A second strategy to help the university system is to supply it with $10 million in research and development money annually. The funds, as the governor envisions it, would be part of a $25 million annual appropriation that would dramatically increase R&D statewide. As a commitment to the system, his plan is a good start. But if the funding leverages as much additional money as grant dollars have historically, the governor should be willing to revisit the issue and develop an even bolder plan for making the state universities economic engines throughout Maine.

Candidates say a lot about themselves simply by what they choose to talk about. The public — press especially — needs to narrow the broad statements of many political speeches by asking candidates for details, by asking how a program will work, how it will be funded. With one month to go in a campaign that seems barely to have started, that is the only way voters will be able to make an informed choice.