Some arguments are lost in the need to make them. If, say, you feel obliged to explain to your beloved why you are walking in the door at 3 a.m., wearing Eau d’Allen’s Coffee Flavored Brandy but no pants, consider yourself the loser in any discussion to follow. When Maine’s new commissioner of economic development, the estimable Jack Cashman of Old Town, insisted to reporters the other day that Maine did indeed have a plan for rescuing its sad economy, those who doubted him won the argument – for now.

This is not to say the Baldacci administration lacks a plan, whether in a single document with color-coded tabs or merely as ideas darting through the minds of its senior members. It has one and Mr. Cashman can explain it ably. But if the plan is not widely known, and this one isn’t, who will follow it? Practically, it does not exist. No plan means that state officials, which includes those at the University of Maine, will do what they think is best. And, if what they think is best is entangling Maine in profits to be gained from the war and chaos in Iraq, no plan steers them elsewhere.

Swiftly, because not even economic-development toilers like the fine print, Maine would grow to prosperity under the Baldacci administration economic plan by reducing taxes and energy costs and increasing college attendance and R&D investment. It would develop the industries of forest products and marine resources, financial services, precision manufacturing and biomedical/biotechnology. There is a sub plan or the beginnings of a sub plan for each of these, but the whole unknown package turns out to be so achingly familiar there is no reason to explain them here.

UMaine, however, has a new version of development, or at least a new presentation of an old version. It has joined the U.S.-Iraq Business Alliance, a group encouraged by the Bush administration to get U.S. businesses their slice of Iraq before all the slices are gone. UMaine professors from nearly every department wrote to university President Peter Hoff this week to tell him that joining the alliance and sponsoring one of its conferences were terrible ideas. “At a time when Iraq is still governed by the U.S. occupation forces, and the publicly owned utilities and other resources are being sold to foreign investors prior to any consent from a duly constituted Iraqi government,” they wrote, “a conference focused on ‘business opportunities’ can only be seen as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.” (The administration may be able to counter the professors on this point by asking, “If you professors really know so much about business opportunities, why do you work for such low pay?”)

A meeting of the business alliance was postponed this week because … well, because the killing in Iraq is intensifying, Paul Bremer, the leader of the provisional government was hauled back to Washington, the governing council is accused of being ineffective, and, well, one thing or another blew up and the Iraqi half of the alliance couldn’t make it to Maine. Undaunted in the face of the crisis, UMaine said, “See you in the spring.” Perhaps.

The choice of promoting business in Iraq during this tragic, uncertain period looks like profiteering no matter that other nations are doing the same. But, aside from the question of poor timing, there is no point in blaming the university for trying to look farther afield. It should do so, fairly and with a sense that shared economic development can produce freedom of the sort Iraq has not known. A more local point is this: The fact that making money in a war zone is one of the hotter ideas in the chill of Maine’s business climate says more about the state’s prospects than anyone should like.

Maine’s recent past should not be measured just in rates of growth or decline, but in the diminished lives of people who have lost the sort of jobs that can sustain a family, in mothers and fathers who can’t work enough hours to pay the bills, in those who went to Boston or Washington to find work and can’t afford to return. Maine’s possible future can be judged by what is happening now to change this course. Gov. Baldacci offers low-tax Pine Tree Zones, which describe all they will contain if current trends continue.

Maine’s slide began a century ago. Gov. Baldacci has been in office just less than a year. His plans are not exciting; there is nothing about them that suggests they will be achieved in the next five or six or 10 years. But they are sensible, if unoriginal, ideas built on what is possible and desirable. They lack one thing: the shared sense that all of Maine needs them to prosper. The governor’s challenge is to make the case that what he is offering is crucial to the state’s future. He should be bold in describing how his ideas can carry the state out of its trough of inadequacy. He should make connections from where we are to where Maine might go. He should be certain that everyone understands what that destination looks like.

If he does, no refutation about the presence of an economic plan would be needed. The argument would be over before it began.

Todd Benoit is the NEWS editorial page editor.