Politico Magazine (Opinion)
By Alan Greenblatt
June 23, 2015
In
2013 Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal called on the GOP to “stop being
the stupid party.” A former Rhodes scholar with serious policy chops, he
appeared perfectly positioned
to elevate the discussion of ideas. Instead, Jindal has chosen to run
in 2016 as the stupid party’s standard-bearer.
As
Jindal prepares to make his White House bid official on Wednesday, he
is struggling to break the one percent mark in national polls. That puts
him a dozen places behind
the top-tier triumvirate of Walker, Bush and Rubio. It’s possible
Jindal will emerge from the back of the pack at some stage of the game,
but it’s just as likely the dumbed-down version of Jindal will never
catch fire.
A
governor who reshaped his state by overhauling the education and
Medicaid systems now hardly talks substance at all. In fairness, he has
released detailed plans on taxes
and education, but he routinely spends his time on the stump throwing
red meat to the most conservative parts of his party. During a visit to
Europe early this year, Jindal complained about “no-go zones” on the
continent where imposition of sharia law had
made non-Muslims unwelcome. Appearing at the Faith and Freedom
Coalition’s Road to Majority conference on Friday, Jindal complained
corporate America had entered into an “unnatural alliance with the
radical left” in working to block religious freedom bills
at the state level.
His
pander approach hasn’t worked for him. “He is smart, he is policy
knowledgeable,” says Henry Olsen, a conservative analyst at the Ethics
& Public Policy Center, “but
rather than build a public persona around his strengths, he has crafted
a public persona around other’s people’s strengths.”
Jindal
is running in the most crowded part of an enormous field. Someone like
Ohio Gov. John Kasich might try to find room by running to the left, but
better-known politicians
crowd out Jindal on the right. Marco Rubio has connected better telling
his American dream and assimilation story, while Mike Huckabee and Ted
Cruz manage to bring more passion to the narrative that faith is under
siege.
Jindal
remains at best second choice for seemingly every segment of the GOP
base. Melissa Clouthier, a conservative blogger based in Texas, calls
Jindal a “fantastic politician,”
but his candidacy has been undermined by simple physics, she says. Two
bodies cannot occupy the same space. “There are governors with his level
of success,” Clouthier says. “There are minority candidates who can
communicate better. There are ideologues who
are more pure.”
It
wasn’t supposed to be this way. Bobby Jindal wasn’t supposed to be an
afterthought. When President Obama was first elected, Jindal was
embraced by Republicans as a
promising alternative, constantly written up in the national media as
an important and notably non-white conservative voice, the GOP’s
“anointed boy wonder” as the Washington Post described him in 2009. The
son of Indian immigrants, Jindal was a Rhodes scholar
who served as Louisiana’s health secretary at the tender age of 24 and
president of the state’s university system not long after. President
George W. Bush appointed him an assistant secretary of the Department
Health and Human Services when he was just 30
years old. Jindal lost his first run for governor in 2003, was
subsequently elected twice to Congress and was elected governor in 2007.
As
governor, Jindal has scored some major conservative victories. He likes
to brag about—and sometimes exaggerate—how much spending and the size
of the state workforce
have shrunk on his watch. But there is no economic “Louisiana miracle”
for Jindal to brag about. Despite the ambition of his education and
Medicaid privatization efforts, Jindal lacks the sort of signature
accomplishment at home—like Scott Walker’s defeat
of the labor unions in Wisconsin—that resonates strongly with voters
elsewhere. Even in Louisiana, the state’s recent budget woes have
dragged Jindal’s approval ratings down to about the 30 percent mark.
Jindal
has sought to compensate for his weak standing as governor with
attention-grabbing rhetoric around the country. Standing outside the
White House following a bipartisan
meeting of governors with the president in February, Jindal broke from
the usual anodyne script for such occasions. Instead, he declared that
Obama was “unfit to be commander in chief,” having “disqualified”
himself with his response—or lack thereof—to “radical
Islamic terrorism.” The following month, Jindal signed onto the
controversial letter GOP senators issued to Iranian leaders, questioning
Obama’s authority to negotiate a nuclear arms deal.
After
religious freedom bills drew opposition in Indiana and Arkansas this
spring, amidst concerns they could lead to anti-gay discrimination,
Jindal’s own legislature
rejected similar legislation. Jindal quickly issued a “marriage and
conscience” executive order to protect business owners who might refuse
to offer services to same-sex couples who are getting married. “I don’t
know about you, but sometimes it feels like
evangelical Christians are the only group that it’s okay to
discriminate against in this society,” Jindal said at a Good Friday
prayer breakfast in Iowa.
Jindal’s
transformation from a policy wonk into an ideologue has been a long
time in the making. George Cross, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette
political scientist,
speculates that Jindal has sought to make himself the focal point of
national debates in order to make up for his own “charisma deficit.”
Jindal’s shortcomings as a speaker were, in fact, put baldly on display
when he was selected to give the official GOP
response to Obama’s first address to Congress in 2009.
Making
what amounted to his debut in the national spotlight, Jindal’s delivery
was hesitant and almost sing-songy. He was widely excoriated, his
man-child manner earning
unflattering comparisons to Kenneth, the page on 30 Rock. “That was
just a terrible appearance,” says David Yepsen, a veteran political
observer who now runs a public policy institute at Southern Illinois
University. “I’m not sure that he ever recovered.”
Other
State of the Union responders have come across as boring or
charismatically challenged. But unlike someone like Marco Rubio, whose
water-guzzling response in 2013
was also panned, Jindal hasn’t had subsequent opportunities to change
people’s minds. Despite that prominent flub, Rubio is widely considered
the best speechmaker at the top of the GOP field. No one ranks Jindal so
highly. And, as the governor of a relatively
small state, Jindal lacks a platform that would allow him to make his
views central to the national debates of the day. “Unlike senators, he’s
not part of the big controversies in Washington,” notes Gary Bauer, a
prominent social conservative who ran for president
in 2000.
By
“swinging for the fences” with his rhetoric, Jindal hasn’t shown
himself in the best light, suggests Chris Broadwater, a Republican state
legislator in Louisiana. “I
don’t necessarily think his campaign reflects who he is, to be honest
with you,” Broadwater says. “One on one, you probably would find him to
be more knowledgeable than anyone else in the race.”
It’s
possible and perhaps even probable that someone who doesn’t look like a
winner now will offer a serious competitive challenge to the party’s
frontrunners by the time
Iowans gather to caucus in February. Jindal has as good a chance of
emerging as anyone, suggests Bauer, president of the nonprofit American
Values. “There’s certainly every reason for a conservative at the
grassroots level to be excited about his candidacy
and to consider him as one of the alternatives in 2016,” Bauer says.
Maybe
so. To this point, however, Jindal has not been able to stake out
positions that distinguish him among the many GOP aspirants, or proven
himself to be the best salesman
for widely-shared ideas.
As
he officially seeks to break into the presidential league, there’s not
much reason to expect that Jindal will end up justifying the kind of
hope and hype that marked
his early career. “The idea of him excited people once,” Henry Olsen
says, “but the fact of him does not.”
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