Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb’s eighth and final State of the State Address was less a call to action than it was a victory lap.
The governor’s speech lasted a little more than 26 minutes.
Roughly the first four minutes he devoted to welcoming everyone and setting the stage. The next 17 or so he spent listing past accomplishments.
Then, in six short paragraphs — all of them one sentence long — he laid out his wish list for the 2024 Indiana General Assembly legislative session.
After that, he said his farewells, a thank you or two and asked God to bless everyone.
All in all, it was not a bit of oratory likely to make anyone forget Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.
At least two things account for the been-there-done-that quality to Holcomb’s last State of the State.
The first is that there just are not that many items left on Indiana Republicans’ legislative to-do list.
The GOP has controlled the governor’s office for 20 years. The Indiana House of Representatives also has been in Republican hands for much of that time, with the GOP enjoying a supermajority for the last decade or so. The Indiana Senate has been a Republican stronghold almost since Abraham Lincoln was a baby, also for many years by supermajority.
During this long tenure, Republicans have turned Indiana into a laboratory for experiments in conservative governance.
Among other things, they have slashed both taxes and many social services, remodeled public education by creating the most expansive and expensive school voucher system in the country and experimented with using free-market forces, with varying success, to meet pressing public problems.
If there was an item left unchecked on the list, it fell into their laps in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Indiana’s Republican lawmakers almost broke their necks rushing to take reproductive choices out of the hands of Hoosier women and their doctors.
Curiously, as Indiana Sen. Shelli Yoder, D-Bloomington, noted after Holcomb finished speaking, that “achievement” went unmentioned in the governor’s address.
The other reason Holcomb’s speech had a perfunctory feel to it has to do with the man himself.
One of the governor’s strengths — perhaps his greatest one as a leader — has been his ability to recognize and accept reality.
He first was elected to office in 2016, the same year that Donald Trump captured the White House.
During the intervening years, America has been a noisy, screaming place, filled with all the ceaseless screaming tumult Trump has produced as he has strutted upon the national stage.
Indiana, by contrast, has been an oasis of relative quiet.
Some of that is because Eric Holcomb is secure and comfortable enough with himself not to require everyone to pay attention to him every day and all the time. He’s willing to let whole weeks go by without asking people to watch him, listen to him or even think about him.
In other words, he’s a functioning adult, not an overgrown child, unlike many of our elected officials these days.
Because of that, it is difficult for anyone other than a rabid partisan to stay mad at him.
At a press conference after the speech, Senate Minority Leader Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis, said as much. Taylor granted that Holcomb had done “a pretty good job” of listening to and working with people with different viewpoints — and Taylor noted that most of the governor’s biggest political problems had come not from Democrats but from the most rabid partisans in his own Republican Party.
That was Holcomb’s misfortune.
He is by inclination and skill set a bridge builder, a guy skilled at keeping people on task and at the table until they figure out ways to solve problems. He is not and probably never has been a shouter — likely because he doesn’t think shouting ever accomplishes much.
He came to power, though, in an era when many of the members of his own party preferred fights to solutions.
It is a testament to Holcomb’s leadership that he was able to govern as quietly as he did — putting into practice in the process what once was a core conservative value, that politics should not be the center of people’s lives and energies.
Eric Holcomb’s last State of the State was almost as quiet as a murmur.
That was its power.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students, where this commentary originally appeared. The opinions expressed by the author do not reflect the views of Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
