It is Tuesday, Feb. 24 night; the combined houses of the US Congress have been listening to America’s saviour-President lay out his plans for slaying the depression dragon and a prominent anchorman is heard to utter “Oh, God” into a microphone that should have been switched off. If Barack Obama had been the person filling our screens at that particular moment, we might have taken the two words at face value.
But if they were spoken to impart awe it was not of the admiration variety. Rather, they evoked distress about what was about to happen. Cue to a very young Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, routinely considered these days to be a rising star of the Republican Party, stepping toward a microphone in the hall of what we supposed was his official mansion in Baton Rouge to give the opposition’s response to President Obama’s speech. Though he hadn’t even opened his mouth, you knew he was about to flop.
And how. Since being elected governor at the end of 2007, Jindal, still just 37 years old and the first Indian-American to reach state-wide office in US history, has been the darling in particular of the right wing of his party, but come Wednesday morning even conservative commentators were joining the chorus flaying him for his performance, using words like “weak”, “wooden”, “insane” and “earnest dork.” Only Rush Limbaugh, who continues to be the loudest scourge of all liberals on the radio dial, stood by him.
Happily, Jindal was recently among pals at an annual confab of conservatives in Washington. Yet, as someone who has enjoyed a life trajectory that has always seemed unidirectional — up, steeply — Jindal must surely have found the drubbing of the last few days perplexing. Probably the party as a whole is a little disoriented also, because the governor, whose university education included a year as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, was seen by many as a future contender for the presidency, perhaps even in 2012.
Of late, the chit-chat of the nation has been less about what Obama said and more about Jindal. At least, he can say now without fear of contradiction that he has made it on to the national stage. In fact, he did especially well given that whoever gives the opposition reply to the president’s annual address to Congress is normally ignored. Jindal was noticed.
Even before this, some Americans were vaguely aware also that the man running the show down in Louisiana was a lot different from most of his predecessors and a bit of a boy wonder. He was in his mid-20s and fresh out of the consulting firm McKinsey and Company when in 1996 the former Louisiana Gov., Mike Foster, tapped him to be secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, an office through which 40 percent of all state spending flowed. Among things about Jindal that most voters probably don’t know: Bobby is not his real name and he prefers creationism over Darwin.
As a career starter, the health post was impressive for the son of Indian immigrants of limited material wherewithal. His family background is compelling enough — poor Indian parents land in Louisiana in search of American dream that comes true when their son becomes governor — that he sketched it out briefly on the night of Feb. 24. There are echoes, of course, of the Obama chronicles in there, not least because both are non-white and both are young. But not everyone thought that that was a good idea either.
His Punjabi parents, Raj and Amar Jindal, left their ancestral town of Khanpura in 1970 bound for the US, to study nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. Bobby was born a year later. Raj, the governor’s mother, information technology director at the Louisiana Labor Department, and Amar were married in a traditional Hindu wedding in Khanpura on the same day in 1969 that American astronauts first walked on the moon. Once in America, the young parents followed the path of so many of other new arrivals in the country — they strove to blend in. “My parents, they had to cut some of those cultural ties,” Jindal once noted. “We spent our holidays going to Disney and Mount Rushmore.”
Displaying some of the precociousness that would become a hallmark of his political career later, the governor was allegedly just four years old when one day he declared that he henceforth wanted to be known as Bobby — a name purloined from Bobby Brady on the then ubiquitous US television sitcom, the Brady Bunch. Bobby has stuck with him ever since though legally his first name remains the one his parents gave him, Piyush. He dropped his Hindu religion and converted to Catholicism while at high school in Baton Rouge. He went from there to Ivy League Brown University to study biology followed by his year at New College, Oxford, where he earned a masters degree in political science. The super-achieving Jindal knew that he wanted a future in politics.
The Health post in Louisiana was only the first of several stepping-stones for Jindal. In 2001, he was appointed by President George Bush to serve as an Assistant Secretary of State. But in 2003, he and his young wife, Supriya Jolly, opted to return to Louisiana, where he made his first run for governor. He lost, but was soon to win election as US congressman.
Then in 2007, with the state still reeling from the effects of Katrina and dogged still by problems of corruption and violent crime, he made his second run at the governorship and won with 54 percent support. His pledge was to end corruption, mend the state’s collapsing public services and back business. Along the way, he made no secret of his social conservative views which include opposing abortion and gay marriage and supporting a form of creationism, known as intelligent design, in the state’s school system alongside the Darwinian theories of evolution.
His youth and even the absence of personal flamboyance — they call him a dork for a reason — somehow seemed appealing in a state exhausted by politicians who turned out to be colorful crooks. And it was fairly early in the 2008 election season that word began to circulate that Jindal may be just the person John McCain needed as a running mate. In the end, the Arizona senator looked to Alaska instead of Louisiana in his vice president search, but the party was taking intense interest in Jindal, not least because his youth and ethnic background seemed to offer a counterweight to Obama.
Jindal had the chance further to burnish himself with a keynote speech at the Republican convention in St. Paul. He never made it there, however, finding himself distracted by Hurricane Gustav rolling in from the Gulf. But then he got a chance once more when the party asked him to deliver the Republican response on Feb. 24.
Maybe he should have declined. His record as governor is solid enough already. Jindal has joined a small group of Republican state governors turning down some of the billions on offer from the newly signed fiscal stimulus plan because it would entail increasing some employment tax burdens on businesses. While Democrats have attacked him for putting ideology ahead of the interests of ordinary workers, he correctly points out that Louisiana is the only state that managed to increase job numbers in December, while every other corner of the country was shedding them.
But it is possible that reading the teleprompter in that hall on Feb. 24 was always only going to do him damage. Is there any Republican out there who could have done a better job, trying to counter Obama who is at the zenith of his political power? “He went in there with high expectations, probably too high for any politician,” said David Johnson, a Republican strategist. “Republicans are looking for a voice to lead them out of the wilderness.”
But wait. Governor Jindal is only 37. It is part of his appeal, of course, but this particular voice may need a few more years of practice before it is seasoned enough really to do what his party is asking of it. Give him time, because one terrible speech does not have to be a career-breaker. Remember a certain southern governor who delivered one of the worst speeches of all time at the Democratic convention back in 1988? His name was Bill Clinton and he got past the embarrassment just fine.
