What's the governor going to do?

In a column Sunday spanking Gov. Mike Easley for not being willing to answer questions about his administration’s handling of mental health programs, Easley spokesman Seth Effron said Friday afternoon it was the press office that made the decision for him not to respond to questions from The News & Observer.
Here’s his quote from the column: “It was our sense here in the press office that there wasn’t going to be an opportunity for the governor to talk about solutions, but quite frankly more about the blame game, and that was not where the governor wanted to go,” said Seth Effron, spokesman for Easley.
Here are several more quotations from Effron, a longtime reporter before joining the Easley administration, that I didn’t have space for in the column:
“The governor trusts us to make those kinds of decisions, so the interview was declined.” He added later, “We made that decision.”
Effron also said, “... Reporters can get away with pointing out problems, but the governor will not let himself do that. If he talks about a problem, he is going to talk about solutions.”
When I asked why his office thought the N&O wouldn’t discuss solutions as well as what went wrong, here’s what Effron had to say: “It was our conclusion ... that there was not an interest (in discussing solutions) in the reporting that would have followed.”
We’ll never know now, of course, but it’s hard to imagine that the newspaper wouldn’t have wanted to know what the governor was going to do about it, and how quickly. The program is obviously broken. The question is, how does the Easley administration intend to fix it?
Maybe there’ll be more news this week. It’s high time. Shoot, I even bet reporters will write about it.