When official’s position is not official position

As a diversion from my usual entertainment choices these days of tooling about the countryside in my pickup truck on $3.30-per-gallon gasoline or sitting at home listening to my furnace send up the chimney the remains of my rapidly dwindling supply of $3.18-per-gallon heating oil, the Associated Press story in Wednesday’s newspaper was most welcome.

The story was tucked away at the bottom of one of the obituaries pages of the paper, and perhaps properly so, considering that it seemed to be somewhat dead on arrival, comprehensionwise. “McGowan claims Baldacci administration neutral on Plum Creek’s development proposal,” read the headline.

Gov. John Baldacci had reportedly told Bowdoin College’s weekly newspaper that the controversial Plum Creek proposal to develop about 20,000 acres in the Moosehead Lake area over the next 30 years was “too sprawling” and needs to be “refined and amended,” the AP story reported.

In response to the governor’s comments – which came as the state’s Land Use Regulation Commission was in the midst of a series of well-attended public hearings regarding the Plum Creek Timber Co. proposal – Baldacci’s conservation commissioner, Pat McGowan, had subsequently claimed that the governor has no official position on the matter, despite what anyone may have read in the papers.

After reading this strange little item, I could picture readers all over Maine mulling the same rhetorical question I was asking myself. “Say what?”

The governor’s remarks sure sounded like an official position to me. For openers, they definitely constituted a position. And, coming from the head beagle of Fortress Augusta, they surely had been expressed by an official, no doubt about that. Ergo, I reasoned, the position was official, no matter how McGowan had spun it.

But on the chance that I might not fully comprehend the subtleties in the meaning of the word “official” I turned to my dawg-eared dictionary for assistance. When used as an adjective, “official” can mean several things, I was reassured, one meaning being “authoritative, authorized,” as in the cited example, “an authorized statement.”

Aha. Perhaps that was it. Baldacci’s statement – his position on Plum Creek – had not been authorized. But wait a minute. Not authorized by whom? This, after all, is the duly elected governor of the Great State of Maine we are talking about here, is it not? The Decider-in-Chief who can opine pretty much as he damn well pleases on any matter that suits his fancy without authorization from some behind-the-scenes controller?

I have never known there to be anyone lurking around the State House with the clout to “authorize” the governor’s every utterance to the press. But if it should turn out that there is such an overlord, the odds that anyone might suspect the conservation commissioner of being it would not seem to be terribly great.

It looks like what we may have here, besides the normal confusion on my part, are a couple of possibilities. One might be that the governor’s interview with the Bowdoin newspaper was one of those “Oops-I-wished-I-hadn’t-said-that” moments that had seemed like a swell idea at the time, but from which he subsequently wished to distance himself lest it prejudice the LURC hearings on Plum Creek. Because the Plum Creek thing lies in McGowan’s bailiwick, the conservation commissioner would be the one drawing the short straw to handle the damage-control job.

Another possibility might be that Baldacci’s stated “unofficial” position on the Plum Creek proposition was cunningly designed to telegraph his official position (which is the same as his unofficial position) to the LURC board that will ultimately decide whether the corporate giant gets to develop the Moosehead Lake area. Sort of a nudge and a wink to help the gang make a decision on the deal. No harm in that. That’s what governors do.

Politicians have been planting messages in newspapers since Gutenberg invented printing from movable type back in the 15th century, and the typographical error shortly thereafter. “Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our [Communist] party,” Russian dictator Joseph Stalin once said, and the old coot who knew how to use that weapon to his advantage had it about right.

Maybe Baldacci offered his opinion of the Plum Creek proposal for publication accidentally on purpose to serve some greater good. Or maybe not. I do not know. But I do know a news story that has a better story behind it when I see one, and that little 4-incher tucked into a remote corner of Wednesday’s paper sure filled the bill.

Not that that is my official position on the matter, understand.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.