Governor stays on message

COLUMBUS

There is one thing you should take away from this week’s state of the state speech.

Gov. John Kasich is going to stay on message, whether he’s talking to a small group of newspaper editors or a large group of lawmakers and invited guests in a school auditorium in Steubenville.

I’ve heard the governor speak dozens of times, and I can give you a basic outline of what he’s going to say before he says it.

I don’t have copies of his speech, because there aren’t any. He doesn’t use teleprompters, often referring to bare-bones notes on a card, if that.

He can do this because he gives the same speech over and over again. Same phrases, same jokes, same shoutouts.

The speech he presented in Steubenville sounded just like the speech he gave a couple of weeks ago to a group of technical school representatives in Columbus. Or to reporters during a year-ender at the governor’s residence in December. Or any of the other appearances he’s made across the state to various groups in recent months.

Smart move

Given the current economic trends, it’s probably a smart move, politically speaking. Though anyone who made the trip to Steubenville expecting something new left sorely disappointed.

You can break Kasich’s talks into three parts: the past, the present and the future.

The past: He starts by painting a picture of what Ohio was like before he took office: hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, $8 billion hole in the budget, the state essentially dead in a ditch by decades of inaction among lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle.

He usually throws in something about how no one believed the situation could be fixed.

How no reporter in the state thought the budget hole could be addressed without devastating social service cuts or tax increases.

How a nation had turned its lonely eyes to Ohio for any sign of hope.

The present: The governor outlines what’s been accomplished since he took the oath of office. And that list is lengthy: budget balanced, unemployment on the decline, tens of thousands of new or retained jobs, small business regulatory reform, JobsOhio.

He touts prison sentencing reform and Medicaid reform. He beams about the elderly accessing state aid to stay in their own houses rather than being forced into nursing homes. He spotlights his war on prescription pain killer peddlers. And he almost always mentions tax cuts — the elimination of the estate tax, in particular.

At this point, he emphasizes that these reforms were discussed for decades but never accomplished, sometimes because of powerful lobbying interests swaying office-holders opinions.

The future: Kasich has a laundry list of goals for the coming year.

Near the top of the list: He wants the state’s education system — K-12 schools, technical schools, community colleges and universities — to stop competing and start cooperating, each one focusing on their strengths.

He wants the business community to outline its employee needs, and schools to respond with degree programs to train students for those jobs.

He wants strong environmental regulations and appropriate taxes and fees on fracking, but not so stringent that they stifle the emerging industry.

His speeches are peppered with the same jokes about wackadoodles (Californians), foreigners (people from other states), Ohio’s greatest politician (Gordon Gee).

Bipartisanship

There’s generally a call for bipartisanship and a call to cut out the politics and a call to refocus on jobs.

“I know it’s not easy sometimes to look at a problem and strip out the politics and who you know and what you know and who helped you and who didn’t, but that’s our job,” Kasich said in Steubenville.

You get the idea. And if you don’t, attend the next Kasich speech and you’ll hear it all over again.

The governor is staying on message. In a nutshell, the state was dead, it’s now on life support, and his policies are going to lead Ohio into prosperity.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in a book in the next few years, with Kasich outlining for the rest of the country how he turned the state around.

Whether you believe any of it or not is a different story.

Marc Kovac is The Vindicator’s Statehouse correspondent. Email him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter at OhioCapitalBlog.