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The inside-outside game in Lansing

Last week, we kicked around the political inside/outside game over Republican state House Speaker Jason Wentworth’s endorsement of the ban on the open carry of weapons in the state Capitol building, despite a news release that implied he was against it.

Now comes the Gretchen Whitmer administration appearing to do the very same thing on the departure of now-former state health director Robert Gordon. It was sort of, now you see him, now you don’t.

Mr. Gordon was not around long enough to be a household name with the general citizenry, but, for many businesses in Michigan, he was very well known, and not joyfully so.

He was the guy signing Epidemic Orders curtailing their hours and conditions of operation.

When the state Supreme Court prevented Whitmer from ordering those restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus, as she explained it, she quickly turned to Mr. Gordon to pick up where she left off. That was much to the chagrin of the GOP legislative leaders and their state House and state Senate members.

They and she have been at odds for some time over her alleged “unilateral” action on the coronavirus, which they didn’t much like, to put it mildly.

As part of the outside game, it appeared to the public that Mr. Gordon was now the “bad guy” in all this, thus giving the appearance that the governor was out of the loop. Quite the contrary. No director in her administration, as with every other administration in state history, can freelance his or her decisions without the implicit or direct blessing of the governor.

So, while Mr. Gordon acted, there was widespread speculation for months that he was on his way out the door, having allegedly fallen into disfavor with his boss (the governor) and others, although nobody in the front office would confirm that.

That speculation reached its apex when former Vice President and soon-to-be-President Joe Biden asked Mr. Gordon to be part of his transition team. The unconfirmed word was the governor’s office shopped the idea to Mr. Biden, hoping that the new administration might find a slot for Mr. Gordon, which would allow the governor to ease him out of the picture without having a messy firing on her hands. Every governor hates to have a public disclosure of a dismissal, because it reflects poorly on the governor who hired the departee in the first place.

Well, Mr. Gordon finished his work with the transition team and was still doing his state gig, signing those orders and appearing occasionally at news conferences with the governor, and then this.

Out of the blue, a terse and not very forthcoming Twitter message revealed he was resigning and leaving for what he cryptically described as the “next chapter.”

Later that day, a reporter got him on the horn at home, asking for more flesh on those bare bones, and the reporter got the cold shoulder. Mr. Gordon unceremoniously referred him back to the statement, wished the reporter a good night, and hung up the phone.

And there, in a nutshell, was part of his problem. He was not very warm and fuzzy. He was intelligent, but abrupt, and did not seem to get along well with folks. And, in a town where you need to have friends to survive, he was apparently lacking in same. He was already on the endangered species list with some Republicans, some of whom had openly called on him to get lost.

One GOP committee chair who had summoned the health director to explain all these business restrictions described him as “somebody who felt he was the smartest guy in the room,” which was code for someone who was hard to get along with, did not listen very well to the thoughts of others, and was just generally a pain in the you-know-what.

Other insiders in town reported pretty much the same take on the not-so-affable Mr. Gordon, and, in one news conference, the governor herself seemed to be taken aback by his gruff behavior.

A reporter asked an innocent question about who could attend high school football games during the outbreak. The governor asked Mr. Gordon to answer, and he did.

He reached the microphone and uttered, “The order speaks for itself,” and he left the podium.

We’d have to review the video, but it looked like the governor winced at the terse and unfriendly response.

While it appeared as part of the outside game that Mr. Gordon was just ready to move on and the governor merely “accepted his resignation,” she gave away the inside game by ending her comments on his tenure with just that: one sentence.

Ouch.

No gold watch. No “Gretchen Whitmer for governor” pin. No pat on the head for your “years of dedicated service,” although, in a later social media comment, she did say thanks, but that was it.

And, to make it even clearer that he was not leaving of his own accord, the governor, within minutes of his tweet, had teed up a new director of the department and heaped three paragraphs of praise on Elizabeth Hertel, who was an understudy now getting the top job.

The governor’s team loves to boast about its commitment to transparency, but, on this one, attempts to present a different outside message on why Mr. Gordon is now looking for work was lost in the very obvious inside plot that it was time for him to go, because, if he was such a valuable member of her team, she would have lobbied him to stay on.

She most certainly did not.

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