Dissembling Gendron & Devious Gov?

Gordon Donaldson's op-ed piece in Thursday's Bangor Daily News (excerpted here, full-text here) suggests that Commissioner Gendron is playing a little fast and loose with statistics in an attempt to justify the Baldacci school district consolidation scheme. The numbers that Donaldson questions have to do with allocation of administrative "overhead,' numbers Gendron uses to make the case for Maine having excessive administration.

A question that arose almost as soon as the Baldacci plan was proposed was whether the Governor was sincere, in the sense of genuinely wishing the plan to be implemented, or whether, instead, he expected it would fail to be adopted. Did he in fact intend to use the plan's non-acceptance for some other political goal?

Unfortunately, the shoddiness of the Baldacci team's work that is exposed by Donaldson lends credence to this theory.

Can Baldacci blame the Legislature's failure to fully adopt his plan as a cause of tax increases and/or growth in the state budget? Certainly the savings he projects in his plan are borderline fantastic; no observer that I've read has yet been able to puzzle out such large savings.

While ordinarily any attempt to divine the "sincerity" of a politician is a foolish exercise, maybe we need at least to question what the Governor is really up to.