Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) “said something out loud that reporters who cover him regularly have known for a long time – he occasionally mangles his language badly, speaking in sentence fragments and run-on sentences as he makes his point,” the Columbia Daily Tribune reports.

Said Nixon in response to a reporter: “That’s a good question. I can do one of two things. I can tell you I don’t have a good answer to that and then I can talk for about a minute, or I can say I don’t have a good answer to that and then we can go to the next question. It is your guys’ choice. Pick a subject. I can talk for a minute on basically anything and be stunningly unquotable.”

“From the very first days of the protests over the police shooting of an unarmed black man here, Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri has been accused of hitting the wrong notes at the wrong times,” the New York Times reports.

“But politicians and others in Missouri said they were not completely surprised by the governor’s handling of the situation in Ferguson. They said his regular approach to governing — a reliance on a tight circle of loyal advisers and an unwavering faith in well-established processes — had proved particularly ill suited to the challenges of Ferguson and a protest movement that views the established processes as fundamentally exclusive and unfair.”

“Mr. Nixon’s supporters say he has been faced with a crisis nearly impossible to handle to everyone’s satisfaction.”

After declaring a state of emergency in anticipation of a grand jury decision on a police officer shooting, TPM notes Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) couldn’t give a straight answer to the question, “Does the buck ultimately stop with you?”

Said Nixon: “I mean, you know… our goal here is to, you know, keep the peace and allow folks’ voices to be heard. In that balance, I’m attempting, you know, I am using the resources we have to martial, to be predictable for both those pillars.”

He added: “I don’t, you know, I’m more, I just will have to say I don’t spend a tremendous amount of time personalizing this vis a vis me.”