Bobby Jindal's Downside (Jindal as POTUS? Take a closer look at his record as Louisiana governor)

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is busy promoting his new tome Leadership and Crisis with book tour stops all over the country. This latest tour comes on top of his previous speaking tours to raise campaign cash for himself and various Republican candidates around the country. The only place Governor Jindal has trouble visiting is his home state of Louisiana. The joke in Louisiana is that Bobby is known as a governor in 49 states.

Governor Jindal is intelligent and very well-educated, and he manages to look like a creditable leader during a crisis. In this he learned well from former Governor Kathleen Blanco's disastrous handling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. He can spout numerous statistics off the top of his head and make complicated situations understandable.

However, as we've learned from the current occupant of the White House, command of statistics and the ability to explain the complicated do not necessarily indicate that one is destined to be a great leader.

Louisiana's last budget was balanced with numerous accounting tricks, one-time funding sources, and massive cuts to health and higher education. Jindal has been criticized for pushing hard decisions down the road to avoid offending anyone in preparation for a presidential bid, and it is well-known in Louisiana that Jindal is preparing to run and campaigning across the country on trips funded by Louisiana taxpayers.

Louisiana is a populist state that tends to overspend in flush times and flail in lean times. In Louisiana, health and higher education are not constitutionally protected from budget cuts and are routinely savaged when the economy dives. To be fair, there is a great deal of waste in higher education that needs to be eliminated, and LSU professors are not helping their cause by threatening to unionize in a state where unions are not looked on favorably. Also, LSU System President Dr. John Lombardi, Louisiana's highest-paid state employee, recently refused to trim his salary for the good of the school and further exposed the hypocrisy in Louisiana higher education.

During Jindal's administration, Louisiana has added over 3,100 new employees, and its budget has increased from $12 billion in 2008 to $24 billion in 2010. The governor seems to think this surge in state government will somehow conquer the budget in the long run.

When it comes to cutting spending, the governor can't cut even his own travel budget. One of Governor Jindal's favorite Louisiana campaign tactics is local church attendance by helicopter in rural areas rarely visited by any governor.

Jindal's celebrated ethics legislation promoting transparency in Louisiana government has backfired (see also here): it has been revealed that enforcement powers were stripped from the Ethics Board, resulting in several resignations in protest, and Jindal has zealously guarded the records of the governor's office from the light of day. The law's most notable accomplishment has been to drive worthy citizens away from serving on state boards by requiring draconian disclosures of every conceivable financial detail and close association in a futile effort to prevent political corruption. Are you kidding? This is Louisiana!

Governor Jindal devotes a sizable portion of Leadership and Crisis to detailing Louisiana's natural beauty, recounting political anecdotes, and listing boilerplate conservative talking points without ever mentioning his plans to deal with the state's looming $1.5-billion budget shortfall or the numerous challenges faced by Louisiana as its graduates flee in search of opportunities the state can't provide.

Jindal doesn't seem to understand is that status quo governing is currently not in vogue. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is talked about as presidential material precisely because of his willingness to shake up New Jersey's insular political culture without thought of higher office. Christie is willing to take on the special interests and make the hard choices New Jersey needs to survive, while Jindal is doing his best not to offend any powerful interests in Louisiana. This type of timid leadership is exactly what the Tea Parties are railing against.

Those promoting or considering Bobby Jindal as presidential material need to take a much closer look at his record as Louisiana governor. Jindal talks the talk, but he doesn't walk the walk.

Hat tip: C.B. Forgotston

Tom Roberson is an independent conservative holding finance and engineering degrees and doing his small part to save his country.

RE: I keep reading articles by people who are supposedly conservatives knocking down potential conservative Presidential candidates one-by-one.

A forum like this one is supposed to be an OPEN discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of a candidate in terms of who can be the best and most conservative President.

My suggestion to all is this — whenever the weaknesses of a candidate are presented, LET’s NOT LOOK AT IT AS AN ATTEMPT TO BASH or DEMEAN or DIMINISH the person.

It is an attempt to look at the pros and cons of a candidate before the primaries.

Too often, this forum devolves into personal attacks against a poster for posting a topic which is clearly meant for discussion and exchange.

No one is perfect and experienced in all aspect of governance or policy, and there is always room for improvement. If Ronald Reagan had to learn from past mistakes.

In the end, we all know who we will NOT vote for and that is the man sitting in the White House.

I keep reading articles by people who are supposedly conservatives knocking down potential conservative Presidential candidates one-by-one.

It is a form of vetting, which the MSM certainly failed to do in 2008 for the Dem candidate.

I posted early on in the 2008 cycle that Fred Thompson was McCain-light and had helped write the Campaign Reform Bill. I got skewered, until others started seeing weaknesses in the Thompson campaign. Even FR was gung-ho pro-Thompson. I posted I thought it strange Guiliana used his cancer as a reason not to face Hillary Clinton for the Senate, while John Kerry, who had the same kind of cancer, mounted a presidential candidacy that almost gave him the White House.

Bandwagon candidates should be vetted substantially. With the advent of the Internet, we can know who they actually are -- over and above their public relations persona -- and what they actually believe. But, we still have the problem of many voters to vote for the same -- like the suddenly converted I saw the light, so I am now a conservative again McCain in AZ.

Vet them! Knock at them. See what their weaknesses are. Check their baggage and verify their baggage claims. It is better to do it early and weed out the undesirables early.

A Thanksgiving Message to All 57 States
.by Sarah Palin on Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 5:46pm.My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…

Of course, the paragraph above is based on a series of misstatements and verbal gaffes made by Barack Obama (I didn’t have enough time to do one for Joe Biden). YouTube links are provided just in case you doubt the accuracy of these all too human slips-of-the-tongue. If you can’t remember hearing about them, that’s because for the most part the media didn’t consider them newsworthy. I have no complaint about that. Everybody makes the occasional verbal gaffe – even news anchors.

Obviously, I would have been even more impressed if the media showed some consistency on this issue. Unfortunately, it seems they couldn’t resist the temptation to turn a simple one word slip-of-the-tongue of mine into a major political headline. The one word slip occurred yesterday during one of my seven back-to-back interviews wherein I was privileged to speak to the American public about the important, world-changing issues before us.

If the media had bothered to actually listen to all of my remarks on Glenn Beck’s radio show, they would have noticed that I refer to South Korea as our ally throughout, that I corrected myself seconds after my slip-of-the-tongue, and that I made it abundantly clear that pressure should be put on China to restrict energy exports to the North Korean regime. The media could even have done due diligence and checked my previous statements on the subject, which have always been consistent, and in fact even ahead of the curve. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story? (And for that matter, why not just make up stories out of thin air – like the totally false hard news story which has run for three days now reporting that I lobbied the producers of “Dancing with the Stars” to cast a former Senate candidate on their show. That lie is further clear proof that the media completely makes things up without doing even rudimentary fact-checking.)

“Hope springs eternal” as the poet says. Let’s hope that perhaps, just maybe, they might get it right next time. When we the people are effective in holding America’s free press accountable for responsible and truthful reporting, then we shall all have even more to be thankful for!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

- Sarah Palin

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