Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Failure to Relaunch

Ed Kilgore has a nice article at TPM on the perpetually fizzling career of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R).

What do you do when at the age of 42 you’ve been a Rhodes Scholar, a state agency head, a university president, a member of Congress and a two-term governor of your state? What if you have also been described as a “genius” for two decades, the epitome of your political party’s new tolerance and diversity, and as part of every wave of every future?

The obvious next step for Bobby Jindal is the White House, but there’s a problem: for all of his credentials and the symbolic freight he carries, his every step towards the Ultimate Prize has been frustrated from the get-go by false starts and the pesky folks back home in Louisiana (including many in his own party) who aren’t real enthused by his performance there.

His most recent effort was a speech at the Ronald Reagan library where he warned against the sidelining of religion in America because the march for equal rights for all of us is an affront to God and makes the Baby Jesus cry.

Ginning up the Religious Right has not been done enough by Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and every other second tier candidate to run for the White House since 1980.  Nor has marginalizing an entire community of Americans and making them the scapegoats for all the evils in the world.

I don’t mind if Gov. Jindal wants to run for president, but I think he’d have better luck if he wasn’t using the campaign of Gary Bauer as a template.