IF YOU WEREN’T listening closely to Gov. Mark Sanford’s State of the State Address Wednesday, you might have missed the fact that he wants to overhaul the government to make it more efficient and accountable.

Government restructuring, which once shared equal billing with income tax reduction as the governor’s defining issues, was relegated to less than a page in the 24-page speech. He did declare that “no issue this year speaks more clearly to our willingness to confront or ignore the changing needs of our state,” yet he made no attempt to sell legislators on the idea that eliminating constitutional officers, merging agencies and putting the governor in charge of more executive functions would help the state; he didn’t even explain how the changes would help. He simply asked that they do it.

Mr. Sanford explained earlier in the day that while “we’re not going to go away” on restructuring, he had slashed the amount of time it got in his most important address of the year because in the past two years “I went into it at great length and was largely ignored.”

If you use legislative results as a measure, the same could be said of his plans to lower income tax rates and to give people a tax break for sending their kids to private schools. But Mr. Sanford didn’t back off either of those ideas — the tax cut got three times as much ink as restructuring, and the school tax credit proposal consumed a full third of the speech, as he made extensive arguments for how each would improve our state.

Unfortunately, this disparity seems a neat reflection of Mr. Sanford’s priorities, and he has now made that breathtakingly clear to the General Assembly: He’s going through the motions on the ideas that would make government more efficient and devoting all of his energy to ideas that would suck money out of our government while we’re skimping on crucial services, and move us in the opposite direction of the well-thought-out plan to improve our schools with an accountability system that is a national model.

This pattern of paying lip service to ideas that would help government better serve the public while aggressively championing ideas that would reduce the size of government ran throughout the speech. Mr. Sanford sees tort reform as a key to improving our economic competitiveness, and we believe it would do much more in this regard than his income tax cut; but it merited a scant two paragraphs in the speech. Similarly, Mr. Sanford pointed to two changes that likely would improve the public school system — consolidating small school districts and focusing teacher incentive pay on those who teach in poor schools or critical subjects. But rather than trying to convince the Legislature to go along with them, he basically wrote them off, and used legislators’ resistance to them as an excuse to send public money to private schools.

Mr. Sanford sounded smart themes in the address: He rejects the notion of doing things the way we’ve always done them when that no longer works. He is focused on improving our lives by making our state more attractive to outsiders. He is determined to lead us into territory we’re not used to even imagining — where the question is “not can we survive, but how do we thrive?”

The goals he articulates are honorable and worthy, and we can’t imagine how anyone could argue with them. But his methods for achieving them are, at best, a gamble. He — and our state — would be much better off if he would focus more on ideas that are not so likely to backfire, to the state’s detriment.