Holcomb shows he’s a true Hoosier

Eric Holcomb doesn’t want to be president.

He doesn’t seem to want to climb up the electoral ladder to become a U.S. Senator.

And that’s all good.

The very fact that he’s focused on doing his job as governor — and that alone — scores points in this era of overly ambitious graspers and grifters that seems to have befallen us.

Tuesday night, Gov. Holcomb laid out his agenda for the upcoming session of the Indiana General Assembly.

And while it was a thoughtful agenda focusing on infrastructure, education, the opioid crisis, and a handful of other issues, it was most striking for what it was not.

It was not an agenda engineered to grab national media attention. It was not an agenda constructed for pollsters or political operatives. It wasn’t something that would get your pulse racing.

Instead, it was earnest.

There’s a word you don’t hear very much when it comes to American politics.

Watching the governor, one senses that he’s still somewhat surprised and bemused to find himself in this role.

The course he laid out on Tuesday night was prose, not poetry.

And that’s okay. Good governance tends to be built on prose rather than poetry or rhetoric or high-flying phrases.

Can we argue about the governor’s priorities? Sure we can.

But the tone he has set guarantees that the debate will be civil.

There’s also another word to describe Gov. Holcomb’s State of the State message this week other than “earnest.”

That word is: Hoosier. — J.R.