Editor’s note: Off the Fifth Floor is an occasional column.
The relationship between the press and the state’s CEO is necessarily fraught with tension, and under the best of circumstances should be adversarial.
The reporters’ job, after all, is to pitch fastballs, sliders, sinkers and curveballs at the governor, (preferably on topics he or she would prefer not to be reminded of), and the governor’s job is to hit those hardball questions out of the park or let them fly by without swinging. (Strikeouts are rare, as the game is played on gubernatorial on turf. They do happen, though, See Dominica, vacation.)
For the first four months of his first term, Gov. Peter Shumlin walked to home base. He answered questions by way of campaign speak and didn’t provide reporters (or the public) new insights into policy matters. In short, he didn’t advance Team Shumlin around the bases with substantive messages about how his staff was implementing the most important aspects of his agenda.
For the last several months, however, Shumlin’s inclination to watch all the pitches zing by has been supplanted by another strategy: calling the game in advance.
Week after week, Shumlin has held press conferences off campus and his staff has orchestrated events that are long on dog and pony show (show and tell time) and short on Q and A sessions with reporters. With the exception of this week’s presser, the events have been at different times, at different locations and with a new cast of characters.
What has been consistent is the extremely limited amount of time reporters are allowed to pose questions (we’re lucky to get 10 to 15 minutes in), and most of the time, the short grilling is conducted in, say, an adult day care center, a mini mart or basement teen center, and the honored participants are treated to an inside baseball game they appear to care little about witnessing.
Granted, his predecessor Gov. Jim Douglas was no easy batter at the plate. Douglas perfected his ability to handle fastball pitches by making a game of information hide and seek, but he at least stood there and took whatever we threw at him. He nearly always gave reporters 25 minutes a week to ask questions. Douglas also was a policy aficionado who could surprise reporters with his depth of understanding of a variety of wonky subjects.
Shumlin, by contrast, is never allowed to waver from the pre-determined game plan worked out by his inner circle. Often, the pitching begins with polite softballs about the topic at hand (flood checks, anyone?) that Shumlin can, indeed, hit home. (It helps that by the time the tough questions are posed, his people are pointing to their watches.) When a topic comes up that Shumlin hasn’t been briefed on, he calls on members of his administration to field the question. If a reporters happen to sneak in a line of inquiry Shumlin doesn’t like, he chides them with the classic bunt move: “The question you should have asked was … ”
This pattern began with the legislative victory lap, in which the governor made a show of dozens of bill signings (with the exception of his controversial budget and tax bills). The flurry of legislative grin-and-grips was followed by the flood tour in which the governor took reporters off campus for elaborate dog and pony shows, most of which shed little or no light onto what is really going on in state government.
In May and June, for example, every weekly press conference was focused on the aftermath of the Montpelier and Lake Champlain floods. Many featured small check hand-out sessions ($25,000 each) to businesses.
This week, Shumlin’s gifts to the Statehouse newshounds were a full 25 minutes of Q and A in his ceremonial office and an announcement that the state was getting around to spending all of the federal stimulus fund money from 2009, and the Department of Energy, it seems, is happy with the way Vermont handled its expenditures. (Municipalities received $18 million for energy efficiency, biomass and energy efficiency projects. East Montpelier, for example, has received $38,000 for a wood pellet heating system for an emergency services facility. Peacham received $22,422 for a project to replace lighting and weatherize the town hall and garage.)
Small municipal grants are important, but it’s not clear what these feel-good, photo-op moments (local selectboard members were on hand to say cheese) have to do with the new governor’s sweeping initiatives.
Remember this? Peter Shumlin A Vision for Vermont
Shumlin expounded on his agenda ad nauseum on the campaign trail last summer, but now that he’s in office, he isn’t apt to say anything concrete about how much transitional housing for ex-cons is in the works or what his administration’s plans are for cutting health care costs as part of setting the stage for single-payer, or whether there have been advances in the rollout of broadband to the rural reaches of the state. Shumlin recently even sidestepped the most obvious, are-you-running-for-governor question.
Shumlin’s commissioners and secretaries, to their great credit, are very responsive to queries from the press, and they supply some of the substance on the day-to-day news items that is missing from the governor’s pressers. The new governor, after all, is not a micro-manager, but a delegator of duties. As for whether viewers in the stands will get a glimpse of the inside baseball the delegator-in-chief practices on the Fifth Floor? That remains to be seen.
