Bobby Jindal

The Louisiana Wunderkind

Beholding Rep. Bobby Jindal

JOHN J. MILLER, National Review

‘When my dad sat you down and said that you had ‘a lot of potential’ — that was not a good speech,” says Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Louisiana Republican. “It meant that you weren’t working hard enough.”

It’s difficult to imagine anybody accusing Jindal of not working hard enough. His life story so far — he’s 35 — is a tale of potential realized. The son of immigrant parents from India, Jindal went to Brown and earned a Rhodes scholarship. At the age of 24, he became the head of Louisiana’s Health and Hospitals Depart¬ment. At 26, he ran a national commission on Medicare. At 28, he became president of the University of Louisiana system. Jindal also served as an assistant secretary of health and human services in the Bush administration and, in 2004, was elected to Congress. He was reelected last year.

Is that good enough, Father Jindal?

The only blemish on this GOP whiz kid’s résumé came in 2003, when he ran for governor of his home state and lost by four points to Democrat Kathleen Blanco. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which laid waste not only to New Orleans but also to Blanco’s reputation as a leader. On March 20, she announced that she would not seek reelection.

Today, Jindal is the most popular politician in Louisiana — and he’s a strong favorite to win the votes for Blanco’s vacated seat from an electorate that’s experiencing a profound case of buyer’s remorse. An April poll gave him a favor¬ability rating of 67 percent, with only 13 percent viewing him unfavorably. Other surveys have showed Jindal clobbering all potential opponents, including former senator John Breaux, a Democrat who re¬cently flirted with running but ultimately de¬clined. Many believe that Jindal will win an outright majority on October 20, when Louisiana voters go to the polls for their famous open primary, and avoid a two-candidate runoff currently scheduled for November 17.

The Jindal juggernaut is welcome news for a Republican party that’s haunted by last year’s congressional disaster and worried about another debacle in next year’s presidential contest. If future historians write accounts of the GOP’s collapse in 2006 and 2008, they will probably place the botched response to Katrina near the center of their narrative. That may have been the moment when the tide of public opinion turned decisively against the Bush administration and Republican governance. Yet Louisiana voters are on the verge of complicating this simple storyline. Instead of conforming to a national trend, they’re preparing to buck it — and advance the career of one of the most impressive young conservatives in the country.

Jindal has bucked trends from the start. In high school, he abandoned his parents’ Hindu faith and became a Christian. In college, he converted to Catholicism — not exactly a the hippest thing to do on an Ivy League campus. At Brown, the student body was so left-of-center that there wasn’t even a chapter of College Republicans. “I was told that the conservatives were the College Democrats,” says Jindal. So he started a Republican group that survives to this day. The experience in Providence toughened Jindal: “I was just about the only person who was pro-life, the only person who thought Ronald Reagan was a good president. Believe me, anybody who leaves Brown as a conservative has had his beliefs tested.”

One summer, Jindal worked on Capitol Hill as an intern. About a week into his job with Rep. Jim McCrery, Jindal asked for more substantive work. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, an eager-beaver college student,’” says McCrery, a Louisiana Republican. “I told him to write a paper on how to improve Medicare. I figured that would keep him busy and I wouldn’t see him again.” Just before the internship ended, however, Jindal dropped a thick manuscript on McCrery’s desk. “It was an excellent piece of work,” says McCrery. “It identified problems, discussed budgetary implications, and suggested reforms.”

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