As predicted, Gov. Piyush Jindal, who has been insisting all along that he has the job he wants, launched his 2016 presidential campaign on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012.
Mark that date. It’s the day after Mitt Romney lost to President Barrack Obama, thus allowing Piyush to accelerate his presidential aspirations by a full four years. Even though he campaigned for Romney, it’s hard to imagine that he was disappointed at the results. He’s not the type to stand on the sidelines for a full eight years.
If there were ever any doubts, they were erased on Tuesday of this week when Jindal offered unsolicited advice to the national Republican Party.
• Never mind that Louisiana has the second highest gender pay gap in the nation;
Piyush Jindal is giving advice to the rest of the country.
• Never mind that Louisiana is the seventh poorest state in the nation;
Piyush Jindal actually believes the national Republican Party should listen to him.
• Never mind that Louisiana has the fifth highest crime rate in the nation;
Piyush Jindal appears oblivious to the state’s problems while insisting he is the go-to man to address party woes on a national scale.
• Never mind that Louisiana has the third highest poverty rate in the nation;
Piyush Jindal apparently believes he can solve the Republican Party’s woes.
• Never mind that Piyush Jindal is closing down hospitals in areas where they are desperately needed by Louisiana’s poor who will have no access to needed health care;
Piyush Jindal is lecturing the Republican Party that it should not be perceived as the party of the elite.
• Never mind that Piyush has insisted on no new taxes on his corporate friends to help plug the budget gaps (he even vetoed the renewal of a cigarette tax in 2011, insisting that he considered it a new tax) while allowing struggling colleges and universities to raise tuition for Louisiana students in order to cover their own budget gaps.
Piyush Jindal considers himself qualified to address the problems of the Republican Party.
• Never mind that Piyush Jindal is consolidating power not only in the legislature that is supposed to be independent, but on the state’s public education board, the LSU Board of Supervisors, the LSU Health Care System, the Louisiana Supreme Court, environmental affairs, and in health care, worker’s compensation and even in state employee group benefits;
Piyush Jindal is lecturing his fellow Republicans that they should be more compassionate while blunting the perception that the GOP is a party of the rich, the privileged, the influential and to concentrate more on being a “party of ideas, details and intelligent solutions.”
This from the man who attempted with every fiber in his benevolent body earlier this year to gut state employee benefits. His proposals, if passed, would have resulted in a 30-year employee earning $52,000 a year having her retirement benefits slashed from $39,000 a year to $6,000—a loss of $33,000 a year.
And remember: career state employees do not receive social security or Medicare benefits. If a state employee worked in the private sector, he or she would qualify for social security but there would be a cut in social security benefits (called an offset) to compensate for the employee’s state retirement.
So much for compassion.
“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts (see: Jindal bailout of the chicken plant in Union Parish), big corporate loopholes (see Jindal tax incentives, exemptions and rebates to businesses through the state Enterprise Zone program), big anything.”
Those words must have a horribly hollow ring on the ears of 111 employees of the Office of Group Benefits who will be losing their jobs right after Christmas. These were employees who had an enviable efficiency record in processing health insurance claims and who managed to turn a $60 million deficit into a $500 million surplus in five years. But that was not good enough for Jindal, who by browbeating compliant legislators into concurrence last week, managed to ram through a contract that will pay Blue Cross/Blue Shield up to $1.1 billion to administer the agency’s claims.
What was it again that Jindal said about not being a party that panders to big business?
If Piyush was trying to sound like President Eisenhower, who warned as he left office that America should guard against the influence of the military-industrial complex, he failed miserably.
But Piyush, should he fail in his bid for the presidency (as he most surely will), he still may have a promising career in stand up comedy. One of his stock lines in that future career could be the advice he gave his fellow Republicans when he urged that they “stop reducing everything to mindless slogans, tag lines.”
“Do more with less,” “Let the dollar follow the child,” and, of course, “I have the job I want” come immediately to mind.
Well, if absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder, then he certainly should love the job he has because he spends so little time doing it.
Jindal also addressed what he called “offensive, bizarre comments” by Republican candidates.
Without mentioning them by name, he was most probably referring to the rape comments by Republican senatorial candidates Richard Mourdock of Indiana who said if a woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape, it would be “God’s will,” and Todd Akin of Missouri who claimed it was impossible for a woman to become pregnant from rape because a woman’s reproductive system shuts down during such events.
He also could have been referencing Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment.
Jindal characterized the gaffs by saying such stupid comments “can’t be tolerated within our party.”
Yeah, but we still have Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann (who during an Aug. 16, 2011, stop in South Carolina, prompted the crowd to give “a shout out to Elvis on his birthday!” Elvis was born on Jan. 8, 1935; Aug. 16, 1977, was the date of his death) and Piyush Jindal—each of whom must’ve gone to the Joe Biden School of Political Idiocy.
Seems like all the ‘never minds’ you cite are exactly what the Kochs, the teabaggers, and the other corporatist fascists would applaud with their ‘no government’ agendas. So Piyush seems to be setting louisiana up to demonstrate just how he’d kowtow to their every whim if they put him in office.
True, mac coon, except that those guys were shown they cannot just put people into office any more. The days of hand-selecting and installing a president, by hook or by crook, ended with P43, and hallelujah.
Wonderfully written article Tom. I hope that you would submit this to Politico so they could hopefully offer the truth behind the myth.
Hear-hear! Wouldn’t be wonderful to nip his presidential aspirations in the bud? 😆
Listen carefully to what Swindle Jindal actually told Republicans: don’t change your policies, change your messaging. By all means, defund public schools and transfer the taxpayer money to private companies, but call it “increasing parental choice.” Change tax policy to make it more regressive by flattening it, thus benefiting disproportionately higher income earners, but call it “reforming and simplifying the tax code.” And on and on and on.
You can believe that a pregnancy resulting from a rape is “God’s will,” and even codify the policy in your party’s platform, but by no means should you be so “stupid” as to spell out “pro-life, no exceptions” in such explicit language. Why, that might just turn people away from the message.
This is why BESE and Dept. of Revenue are paying six-figure salaries to communications directors. It’s about hiding the pig in a much prettier poke.
Also, his actual record in Louisiana, which Tom so thoroughly documents, may explain why P-U Jindal will only grant these extended interviews to out-of-state media outlets, but not the local media. (Then, of course, he would actually have to be in state doing something crazy — like his job.)
Great, will be interesting to see how many dumb downed conservativism remarks he made in the last ten years or so..it will be funny to us and will cause the dumb downed who believe in Jindal instead of reality, to say, are you calling me dumb? No, Jindal did. and I only called you ignorant and prejudiced. Let’s get started with the Inaugaral address, something like..Come home, Come home I am calling special session to revamp our Ethics Bd to provide transparency and end corruption……and where are those La. air force jets to announce my ascendancy??rrt
Gov. Piyush Jindal is posturing for a run at the Senate in 2014 ,before he takes a shot at the Presidency
I understand that most who read this website are liberal in their views. Those things mentioned above by the writer sound horrible to people who are liberal but the simple questions is this………how do we as citizens pay for all of these programs? Higher tax rates on the rich I suppose. But when that doesn’t cover the spending gap (and it won’t), then what? Programs will have to be cut. So, who gets the short end of the stick? These are the realities as most adults know. Just so you don’t think I am some Koch brothers crazy, I am for a womans right to choose, gay marriage and a level playing field for who ever wants to play. But I am also for low taxes (I earned it-let me spend it how I see fit)and a balanced budget. As you can tell, I don’t fit into either parties ideology as both have gone too far in either direction.
Contrary to your opening sentence, I believe most of the readers of LouisianaVoice fit into the same political ideology to which you assign yourself—basically rational, independent thinkers.
That being said, you raise some valid and thought-provoking points that warrant serious discussion and I thank you for raising them.
First of all, Jindal vetoed the Stelly Plan which immediately and in each subsequent year has cost the state approximately $300 million in revenue.
Jindal also spurned federal grants of $80.6 million for the installation of broadband internet to rural areas of Louisiana. Broadband will be installed but now some other state will get that grant money and in the meantime, the Department of Education is begging for state funds to underwrite the broadband expansion.
Jindal rejected outright a $60 million federal grant for early childhood development–money that will have to be made up from other sources (state). Meanwhile, other states will share that $60 million.
Jindal likewise rejected outright a federal grant of some $300 million to finance installation of a high-speed commuter rail connection between Baton Rouge and New Orleans—a project strongly endorsed by the Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce. Efforts have been renewed for the project but the funds now will have to come from other sources.
Jindal is in the process of dismantling Louisiana’s governmental infrastructure that includes prisons, hospitals, higher education and public education. That will mean a lack of healthcare for the state’s poor, more costly tuition for students already up to their necks in student loans, higher costs to house prisoners when our prisons are privatized, and the list goes on.
In today’s paper, it was announced that Jindal will not allow Louisiana to participate in a health insurance exchange. That means that even more Louisiana citizens will be without health insurance, thus placing an even greater strain on our state hospitals which have alreay been gutted.
Jindal’s cutbacks to the LSU healthcare system, it was revealed after the fact, will cost the state hundreds of millions in money lost in funding to train physicians.
In the meantime, Jindal keeps appointing political cronies and washed up legislators to six-figure state jobs for which they are woefully unqualified. His Department of Education, for example has more six-figure salaries than ever before in this state’s history. Some of those six-figure hirees are working part time and even allowed to work from their homes in such places as Los Angeles an Tallahassee. Would you call that prudent fiscal management? I would not.
Gov. Jindal is philosophically opposed to accepting federal funds but after making that widely known, he still accepted federal stimulus funds which he passed on to Louisiana communities during his frequent visits to protestant churches during his first term (have you noticed he has not visited a single church since his re-election?).
Moreover, one of his appointees to the LSU Board of Supervisors (a man with only a high school diploma, no less—serving on the board of the state’s flagship university) has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal crop subsidies through several of his corporate entities.
As I said, you have raised some valid points but at the same time, we feel that we, too, have raised valid points about the manner in which this absentee governor chooses to administer to the state’s interests.
Finally, please feel free to continue your editorial contributions. We invite scholarly thought and serious dialog—even if they don’t always square with our opinions.
Cut programs to the rich contractors and stop hiring all of his cronies at six figure salaries. Contracts in state government should be looked at – contracts to attorneys to help civil service steal and intimidate employees, while supplementing their corporate salaries should be cut. There is a lot of waste that can be cut without cutting programs to the poor and rank and file civil servants.
Tom: Do I have permission to publish your entire (Or parts of) posting to some national political websites of the liberal/centrist persuasion? Will naturally credit your authorship. They seem to be impressed with the moderate Bobby Jindal. I wish to disabuse them of that notion. Thanks.
Certainly. Feel free to use any or all.
Piyush is a sideline loser. Nice how he plays hindsight sniper. What a doofus.
You forgot to add he is a minority with no minorities in his top administration.
Ouch!!
I agree with FOR REAL that Jindal is doing the Mitt Romney shift for the express purpose of running against Senator Mary Landrieu. He recognizes that the same demographics which defeated Romney will apply to him in a run against the incumbent. Mary Matalin and the NRSC will convince him of the desperate need to forestall his Presidential aspirations for the sake of the Party.