Strickland adjusts priorities in year full of challenges

Strickland adjusts priorities in year full of challenges

Coming off a year during which an inordinate amount of time was spent just getting a budget passed, Gov. Ted Strickland delivered a State of the State address that was more of an old fashioned sermon than an announcement of new initiatives.

In his former life, Strickland was a minister by profession, and Tuesday he adopted the rhythms of a preacher as he listed the reasons he believes in Ohio.

Strickland’s credo includes a faith in the states’s history as the birth place of innovation, invention and adventure. It encompasses melding centuries of excellence in agriculture with emerging biofuels. It combines business and education in an alliance in which each one helps the other. And it recognizes that people are Ohio’s most important product.

A look back in the fourth

Strickland, giving his fourth State of the State address, also talked about some of the accomplishments of his administration, including expanding the Homestead Property Tax Exemption and cutting taxes to the point that Ohio now has the lowest business taxes in the Midwest.

He also took credit for the electricity reform bill that short circuited the impending deregulation that would have increased rates. Ohioans now pay 10 percent less for electricity than the national average.

And while Strickland announced a number of initiatives to encourage the creation of jobs in the private sector, he was able to say that “today Ohio has 5,021 fewer state employees than when I took office. That’s fewer state employees than at any time since Ronald Reagan was in the White House.” That’s a reduction that runs counter to the conventional wisdom that all government ever does is grow.

What was missing from this year’s address was the specificity he offered in previous years, including last when he concentrated on education issues, and even threw down the gauntlet to his Republican opposition on, for instance, charter school expansion.

Changing landscape

Last year, Strickland knew he had a year of financial challenges ahead, but he didn’t know he’d be facing an increasingly poisonous political climate or dismal unemployment prospects as far as the eye can see. Or a population that has become conditioned to demand more jobs and less taxes, better services and smaller government.

If Strickland’s opponents were waiting for him to unveil massive new programs that they could shoot down, they were disappointed. Indeed, the criticism by Cincinnati Republican Rep. Lou Blessing that “it sounds like what the governor has done is rename programs and rehash them,” could be viewed as a favorable recognition of Strickland’s fiscal restraint in these trying times.

The governor’s speech was an attempt to help Ohioans see better days ahead. He ended by citing the state’s motto, “With God all things are possible.”

But in politics, only some things are possible. Strickland will have to concentrate on his bare-bones agenda over the nine months leading up to a November election in which incumbency seems to carry no advantage, and might be a disadvantage.