Governor Mitch returns and goes off to Europe

The Indianapolis Star reports that Indiana's version of the ivory-billed woodpecker has been seen and is now on his way to Europe. Reading the last article raised my ire and my sense of sarcasm this morning. Mitch Daniels now complains how hard it is to bring high tech jobs to Indiana.

"This state is like an incredibly large tanker to turn around," Daniels said in an interview this week. "You simply can't change a situation in two, four, six or eight years -- a situation that evolved over 40 years."

The Star apparently credits the Honda factory and the Rolls Royce engineering center as a high tech success for Mitch. No mention of the Purdue life sciences project or much about the life science initiative in general, but that started under Governor O'Bannon's administration, didn't it?

Daniels' went on to talk a bit about diversifying Indiana's economy:

While most of the new jobs are in plants, Daniels said he never intended to single out high technology or manufacturing. "This is never going to be an either/or proposition," Daniels said. "We are after jobs, all kinds. I hope we always remain a manufacturing state."

But, he said, Indiana ought to diversify the economy, making it less prone to the up-and-down manufacturing cycle, and creating more jobs to retain college graduates who now leave the state for better opportunities

Marion's Mayor Seybold gets quoted about how the economy is now a knowledge based economy - even call centers.

Now for all of Governor Daniels' self-proclaimed proclivity for bold action, why has he not struck out boldly about the need for skilled workers and the importance of an education and for those 21st Century industries? Oh, yeah, he was selling off state assets and bashing his Democratic predecessors.

Update: I see that Taking Down Words posted this morning on this same article. TDW jumps on the numbers a bit more than I did above and does so in better prose than I think I managed this morning:

That's 33,000 jobs in two years. When Joe Kernan took office in September 2003, 2,891,500 Hoosiers were employed. When he left office in January 2005, that number had jumped to 2,942,400, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. TDW's no math whiz, but those number seem a bit more impressive than the Guv's.

Now, no one wants to go back and live the 2004 campaign over again, but it sure would be nice if the Guv practiced a little of what he preaches. Indiana's economy is not "red-hot." It doesn't even have a cool pink center right now. And it would be nice if the Outsourcer In Chief would acknowledge that all is not well for most Hoosiers and start developing a coherent plan for turning our state around.

That, not the piling on of more pie-eyed talking points, is what leadership is all about. But he's always been a putter-downer, not a builder-upper. That may well be a large part of the problem.