GOV. MARK SANFORD’S second State of the State address Wednesday night was, by his own admission, not particularly inspiring.

One reason was that the speech contained no flashy new proposals but was built around one of Mr. Sanford’s best traits — his dogged, consistent focus on a few ideas he believes are central to improving our state.

And indeed, the fact that he keeps repeating them does not diminish the fact that they are essential. We do need to restructure our disjointed governmental structure, to consolidate duplicative agencies, to draw a clear line of authority to the governor, to eliminate competing fiefdoms headed by elected officials. We do need to make sure our tax system encourages activities we want to encourage, such as job development and income growth, and we need to marshal other resources — notably our higher education system — to that end. We do need to take a holistic view of government when we write a state budget, and to do the work and make the difficult decisions required to balance that budget responsibly. No doubt Mr. Sanford is running out of inspiring ways to say these very basic things, but they are things that cannot be said too many times.

Beyond these well-focused major initiatives, the speech did point in some other positive directions.

It demonstrated that Mr. Sanford has learned in the last year that in order to succeed, he must work with the Legislature, rather than simply throwing out his ideas and hoping that somehow when they land on the second floor of the State House, the Socratic dialogue will take over and produce miraculous results. And it gave a boost to several lesser measures — from doing away with minibottles and closing loopholes in our drunken driving law to ending state agency lobbying and eliminating some of the problems with the TERI incentive program for state employees — nearly all of which our state would benefit from seeing passed.

Again, like the major items, these are not new ideas, but important nonetheless.

But perhaps the biggest reason this address failed to inspire was that Mr. Sanford failed to address adequately the state’s biggest job, the task that is essential if we hope to achieve his chief goal of raising our standard of living: investing in the human capital needed to move us forward, through our public education system.

Put aside the fact that Mr. Sanford inherited a huge budget deficit, does not want to raise taxes and believes it is a tactical mistake to greatly increase funding when he believes existing allocations could be better spent. Agree with him on all that, and there remains a glaring problem with the way our governor looks at education: He sees the half-full glass as three-quarters empty.

He focuses on our failures and shortcomings but fails to acknowledge our successes and improvements: ranking first in the nation for improving teacher quality and raising SAT scores; receiving seventh-place marks nationally for our standards and accountability; greatly improving our scores on important national and international standardized tests. Acknowledge our progress, and you are more likely to at least commit to improving funding once the economy turns around, rather than setting the stage to keep shortchanging education.

We like this governor’s vision. We hope to see him succeed on nearly every initiative he is pursuing, and we applaud the sweep and courage and hard work behind his efforts. Our concern is with the one, glaring gap in his vision. We want him to see more, and in so doing, to greatly increase the chance that the vision he has articulated will be realized.