It was appropriate for Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich to hold his final State of the State speech at Otterbein University, the small liberal arts college affiliated with the Methodist Church.
Not because Kasich was touting the revitalization of a small town like Westerville or singing the praises of higher education in the state.
It was appropriate because Kasich sounded a lot like a professor delivering a philosophy lecture on the meaning of life.
The term-limited governor didn’t seem interested in doing a victory lap about his nearly eight years in office. And if it was supposed to be a prelude to a 2020 presidential run or a rebuke of Republican President Donald Trump, it was outside-the-box and nuanced.
At times he more resembled a minister giving a sermon about values and human compassion than the outgoing governor of the seventh-largest state in the nation.
Kasich departed from the usual policy-oriented – or even politically oriented – focus typically associated with the State of the State and spent the better part of his nearly hour-long address waxing poetic about philosophers of the past.
Instead of dropping the names of constituents or department heads, Kasich mentioned Aristotle, Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard. He talked about humanism and existentialism instead of capitalism and libertarianism.
And instead of critiquing the government’s performance, he critiqued the divisive culture in a number of facets of life – business, media, Hollywood and religion – and mused on the theory of life.
“I’ve concluded that human reason is imperfect,” Kasich said. “It just doesn’t work. It can only take us so far from whence the winds of change can move us and we can find ourselves lost. You know for many years now – 30 or 40 years – I’ve been studying and thinking and working to find my purpose.”
But amid his analysis – a possible indictment on the current political climate caused by Trump – Kasich tried to give a message of hope as he begins the march toward his exit from office.
Kasich’s speech wasn’t completely devoid of policy. He announced a new state park in Muskingum and Morgan counties named after Jesse Owens, a decrease in opioid prescriptions and deaths, praised criminal justice reform that’s led to the lowest entry into state prisons in 27 years, said he was proud of a decrease in the uninsured rate and hailed the efforts to combat human trafficking.
He said resoundingly that the state had rebounded since he took office in 2011.
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