COMMENTARY: Mike Braun's lonely, lonely night

And some loiter just because they want attention and surfing the wave generated by the biggest speech a governor gives all year can make that happen.

This year, though, minutes after Indiana Gov. Mike Braun finished his second State of the State, the hall outside the House chamber was almost empty.

A few protestors holding handmade signs and shouting incomprehensible chants clustered outside the doors, but few others remained.

It was as if someone pulled a fire alarm and the building vacated.

The why of this is easy to determine.

The best thing that can be said about Braun’s speech is that it was short—a listless 22-minute address that was short on substance and long on self-congratulatory gestures, many of them either selective or spurious.

Effective State of the State speeches summon citizens to do great things. They are calls to action, the blare of a bugle designed to fire the spirits of lawmakers and the people they represent to meet looming challenges.

Braun’s address, though, had all the lift of a week-old grocery list.

It was a tired and tiresome offering, one that lacked a coherent theme, message or agenda for the state. About the only interest it generated came from watching to see if Braun would dislocate a shoulder patting himself on the back.

He made it sound as if Indiana were an economic paradise, rather than a state where per capita household income has lagged for decades. He said that Indiana was doing great and that Hoosiers were doing great.

It was a curious approach for a governor with public approval ratings rivaled only by nasty communicable diseases.

Reputable sources within the GOP have told me that their polls have found that Braun, a Republican serving in one of the reddest states in the country, recorded only a 24% approval rating. Worse, a recent poll commissioned in Braun’s home country, Dubois County, found that he had only 16% support.

The return of the bubonic plague would poll better than that.

Given this evidence of a lack of confidence in the governor’s leadership, it might have made sense for Braun to make use of the moment and confront the problem. He could have said that he had heard the voters and would rededicate himself and his administration to addressing their concerns.

Instead, the governor said, in effect, that those concerns were all in the heads of the citizenry, delusions that they should ignore.

To bolster this thesis, he offered arguments about wage growth contradicted by data reported by reputable sources and supported only by isolated outliers. He applauded the work of the Indiana State Police and the Indiana National Guard and all but demanded that his listeners leave their seats to offer perfunctory and tepid standing ovations.

He roamed the countryside looking for good things that had happened on his watch to tout. He stopped just short of taking credit for the sun’s rise every morning and the glistening beauty of the season’s first snowfall.

To be fair, Braun came to the moment facing huge political challenges.

Thanks to the semi-special session the governor called in December to try to ram through President Donald Trump’s ill-advised gerrymandering scheme, Braun faces an Indiana General Assembly that is at best indifferent and at worst hostile to his leadership. It cannot be fun to work in a building in which everyone is angry.

But other governors—Mitch Daniels comes to mind—have seen such moments as an opportunity to lead, not a reason to tread water.

Effective governors have two or three big goals they want to achieve, grand policy objectives they tout whenever and wherever anyone will listen.

As Mike Braun enters the second year of his governorship, reasonable people still wonder why he wanted to occupy the state’s most prominent office—what he wants to accomplish with the power the state’s people have granted him.

The reason the Statehouse was empty after Braun’s State of the State is that this governor gave people no reason to stick around.