"As a candidate for Governor, I announced an aggressive jobs goal," said Scott Walker in his State of the State Address last night.

PDF text here. That aggressive goal is unmet — and Walker's opponents love, above all, to point to that unmet goal — but Walker talked about it, a lot, and spoke the number, 250,000.

When I spoke about our jobs goal more than four years ago, I also made a pledge to help the people of Wisconsin create 10,000 new businesses by 2015. Tonight, I am proud to announce we exceeded that goal with nearly 13,000 new businesses created so far.

This is a great sign for the future as thousands of new employers bring the potential of even more jobs. Think about it, if each of these new ventures grew by 15 employees or more by next year, we would more than exceed our 250,000 jobs goal.

So he spoke openly about the numbers, presenting them in a manner that might instill confidence in his continued leadership. For example:

Private sector job creation between April and November was the best since 1994.

That line impressed me so much as I was watching the speech last night that I jotted down "1994" so I could find it in the text. I think I said "wow" out loud. In the light of day, I see that he's sliced out a very particular time period, between April and November.

The seasonally adjusted private sector job growth from November 2012 to November 2013 ranked Wisconsin higher than Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. According to the latest national report, personal income grew 4.4% over the year; faster than the U.S.

In fact, Wisconsin ranked as the 4th best state in the country for personal income growth from the second quarter to the third quarter in 2013. After years of a stagnant market, a key component of the American Dream, home sales are up by nearly 11% and housing permits are up 12.9%. And according to quarterly and monthly job reports, more than 100,000 jobs have been created over the past three years....

Every time we help someone find a job, it makes for a stronger home, a stronger community, and a stronger state.

Each of these people were looking for a job, or a better opportunity, over the past three years. They represent the people and the families behind the numbers. These are the faces of an improving economy in our state. Wisconsin is going back to work.

Notice not only the presentation of statistics to good effect but also the empathy for people. There were numerous occasions when groups of people — Wisconsinites who got jobs — came out onto the stage, and Walker introduced them all individually — "Joann Stephens from Appleton is employed as a Quality Engineer at Surface Mount Technology, Heyward Gualandi from Madison is employed as a Sales Supervisor at Beechwood Sales and Services..." — and ad libbed with them affably. It was pretty good theater of jobs production. When you crowd people who got jobs onto the podium, it looks like a lot of people.

I also liked when he talked up tourism, especially food-based tourism:

Not only is Asia a major market for our ginseng, many people now come to north central Wisconsin to tour our ginseng operations. Food- and beverage-related tourism continues to grow. From tours of breweries, wineries, cheese factories, cranberry fests, and even spice operations, Wisconsin is a great destination.

Let others do their Napa Valley wine tours. We've got the ginseng and cranberries, not just to be eaten, but to be viewed in their natural habitat.

Here's the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article, with a great photo at the top but studded with Democratic carping about the unmet jobs goal.

[Democrats] point out that the state ranks 37th in the nation in private-sector jobs under Walker's leadership and that the 104,372 private-sector jobs created since 2010 are less than half of the 250,000 he promised in his first campaign.

Walker's ostensible opponent in this fall's election,  Mary Burke, is quoted:

Burke, a former state commerce secretary, said she agreed with using some of the money on worker training and a property tax cut. But she said that because the surplus is only a projection, she would put more money into the state rainy-day fund and pay down state debt.

"I don't know too many Wisconsin families who would rush out to spend money they may not even have on new things, particularly when they've already racked up a bunch of debt and have other bills coming due," Burke said in a statement.

So she's supposedly more careful about debt than the governor who produced the surplus and proposes putting $100 million into the rainy day fund. It's usually the Democrat who seems to want to "rush out to spend money... on new things," but she's saying take stronger action against debt that we don't even think we have? That's not really strange when you see that Walker is proposing a $504 million tax cut. Walker said:

What do you do with a surplus? Give it back to the people who earned it. It's your money. I propose that we deposit a portion of these new revenues in the state's rainy day fund and use the remainder to provide much needed tax relief to you — the hardworking taxpayers of Wisconsin.

Burke analogizes the surplus to a family's unspent money, so this causes tax relief to be portrayed as spending. The family is rushing out to spend extra money it thinks it has, but maybe it should be more careful. Walker's characterization of the surplus rejects that analogy to family budgeting. The government has that extra money because it took more than it needed from the people, so the right thing to do is to return it.

The homely family analogy might be: A daughter tells the parents she's going to need $20,000 to cover her expenses while she's going to college, and they work hard and scrimp to send that money to her. She's grateful and is very careful selecting housing and buying and preparing food and wearing inexpensive clothing and enjoying cheap or free entertainment. She calculates that she's on course to spend only half of that money, so she happily reports that to her parents so they can keep more of their income. That seems to be the morally correct answer, as opposed to thinking: Okay, I don't know if I can keep up this way of living, so I'd better hang onto the money in case it turns out I spend more. 

It's the parents' money!