Louisiana Voice

“We need to stop being simplistic. We need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

“We’ve got to stop being the stupid party. It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults. We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. I’m here to say we’ve had enough of that.”

“No more self-analysis; we’ve had our catharsis. The season for navel gazing has passed. At some point, the American public is going to revolt against the nanny state and the leftward march of this president. I don’t know when the tipping point will come, but I believe it will come soon. In the meantime Republicans, hold fast, get smarter, get disciplined, get on offense and put on your big boy pants.”

Contradictory? You bet. Fuel for political debate? Well, it should be except that all three statements were uttered by none other than Bobby Jindal, guvnor of the gret stet of Looziana.

There was a time when observers believed he couldn’t possibly do or say anything that would overshadow the disaster of his 2009 Republican response to President Obama’s State of Union address.

Remember that train wreck? His performance evoked comments like “laughable,” “amateurish,” “Awkward with a capital A,” “I am absolutely stunned” (MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow), “Oh, God,” (MSNBC’s Chris Matthews), “It was a flop,” and best of all (or worst of all, depending upon your political leanings), “After watching Jindal, I’d pay a lot of money to be back watching a (Sarah) Palin speech.”

Ouch. Yes, it would seem difficult to say or do anything more underwhelming than that.

Well, those observers were all wrong. Of course it got worse, much worse. It’s the Jindal karma.

Bobby Jindal is the Paula Deen of Republican pundits; the Yogi Berra of political philosophy. His utterances make Les Miles sound downright scholarly.

When Rick Perry forgot the Department of Education as one of three agencies he would abolish as president, it was uncomfortably amusing.

But recent comments by Jindal (who remember, endorsed Perry’s disastrous campaign for the Republican presidential nomination) are just embarrassing—to everyone but Jindal and his handlers (read: Timmy Teepell), apparently.

Last November, right after Obama defeated Mitt Romney, it was Jindal who jumped in front of a one-man parade to say, “We need to stop being simplistic. We need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

Less than three months later, in January of this year, Jindal gave the keynote address at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting. He said the Republicans don’t need to change values but “might need to change just about everything else we are doing.”

It was in that address that he dropped the now-infamous “stupid party” bombshell.

“We’ve got to stop being the stupid party. It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults,” he said. “We had a number of Republicans damage the brand (so now the party is a “brand,” like so much laundry detergent or toothpaste) this year with offensive and bizarre comments. I’m here to say we’ve had enough of that.”

Well, not quite yet. With Jindal, there never seems to be “enough of that.”

On June 18, he did it again, this time in an op-ed piece in Politico. While apparently wearing his John Wayne hat and his six-guns, he admonished his Republican brethren to “put on their big boy pants.”

Jindal, executing a perfect 180, said, “How about we take all of this energy being spent on autopsies and focus it on painting a picture for the American public, particularly for young people, of what a free and prosperous American future will look like with smart conservative policies?”

He said that Democrats, among other things, believe the earth is flat, that the IRS should violate our constitutional rights and that reporters should be spied on. And while he accused the left of other transgressions as well, those three should warrant particular attention because it was Republican Richard Nixon who used the IRS against his enemies and who spied on reporters and it is the church-affiliated charter schools, using the Bob Jones University text books who teach that the earth is only 7,000 to 10,000 years old, that Moses was 500 years old when his first son was born, and contrary to conventional teachings that it took thousands of years for man to develop written language, man was able to write from the beginning because Adam wrote a poem to God—before eating from the tree of knowledge.

“Eventually Americans will rise up against this new era of big government and this new reign of politically correct terror,” Jindal said. “In the meantime, Republicans—hold fast, get smarter, get disciplined, get on offense and put on your big boy pants.”

Avik Roy, writing Wednesday, June 26, for the National Review, offered a defense—of sorts—describing Jindal as “the brainiest Republican of our time” while acknowledging that he “has a few things to answer for.”

If Jindal is indeed “the brainiest Republican of our time,” as Roy suggests, then the party is in far deeper trouble than anyone could imagine.

That op-ed piece and the big-boy pants line, which Jindal may well come to regret as much as the account of his exorcism while a student at Brown University, prompted Public Service Commission member Foster Campbell to say on public radio’s Jim Engster Show on Monday that Jindal “needs to quit thinking about personal politics and do his job. There are so many problems in Louisiana that he should be worried about instead of running all over the country giving speeches. He hugged up to Romney during the campaign in an attempt to get chosen as his vice presidential running mate and two weeks after the election, turned on him.

“He’s so ambitious to be vice president or president,” Campbell said. “He should get back here in Louisiana and do the job the people elected him to do. We have people in Louisiana who are hurting and he’s running around the country talking about bed wetting and big boy pants.

“He’s like a little dog barking and trying to catch up with a car.”

Campbell said the vision of Bobby Jindal telling someone, anyone, to stop bed wetting and to put their big boy pants on is something he could not comprehend.

“If he has his big boy pants on, he shouldn’t need a large state police security detail with him when he travels,” he said. “One or two (bodyguards) should suffice.”

And if Jindal is a big boy, Campbell said, “He wouldn’t need lifts in his shoes.”