“Bobby Jindal’s Public Humiliation”: Why There’s A Nasty Side To His Thirst For Power
Of the many rituals that accompany U.S. politics, one of the least-important but most-discussed is the spectacle of watching a hopeless, clueless and joyless presidential campaign falter on the runway before swiftly concluding in a fiery crash. Every four years, there’s at least one — and often more than one — such campaign. The candidate is usually already a figure of derision among the press, and it’s often not clear to outsiders whether even they truly believe they will, or even should, become the president. The whole quadrennial enterprise tends to be either a guilty pleasure or a cause for sorrow, depending on how idealistic (and sadistic) you are already.
Some recent examples: In 2004, Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich was the at least somewhat earnest candidate that the press preemptively dismissed, while Rev. Al Sharpton was the one whose sincerity was widely questioned. Kucinich reprised the role somewhat in 2008, but had competition from former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel; Sen. Joe Biden, meanwhile, was the guy the press didn’t take seriously enough to let voters decide for themselves. On the Republican side in 2008, Rep. Ron Paul ran a heartfelt campaign that the media deemed unserious, while one-time ambassador Alan Keyes provided comic relief. And in 2012, one of the media’s favorite punching bags, Rep. Michele Bachmann, was a kind of right-wing Kucinich, while pizza mogul Herman Cain left many wondering whether he was engaged in an elaborate form of performance art.
At this point, it’s too early to know for sure who will fill these designated roles in the 2016 presidential race. And if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nabs the Democratic nomination with little effort, as many expect, the potential cast of characters will be smaller than is the norm. Still, it’s starting to look like there will be at least one presidential candidate who will waste everyone’s time by pursuing the White House. I’m thinking, of course, about the nascent presidential campaign of Gov. Bobby Jindal, who has begun flirting with some noxious forces in our society, and who is otherwise completely undeserving of anyone outside of Louisiana’s attention. Jindal will never be president — but whether his campaign is remembered as a routine failure, or a shameful disgrace, is far less certain.
Most of the worst stuff Jindal’s done lately has flown under the radar, so here’s a primer for those of you who haven’t paid much attention to the Louisiana pol since 2009, when he blew his State of the Union response by reminding everyone of “30 Rock’s” Kenneth. While Jindal still hasn’t formally announced his intention to run for president — and hasn’t even launched the pro forma exploratory committee, either — his desire to live at 1600 remains one of Louisiana’s “worst-kept” secrets. Yet ever since that embarrassing introduction to the television-watching public, Jindal’s had a problem: beyond his own ambition, a reason for him to run has been hard to find. And with each new iteration of a pre-campaign shtick, Jindal gets worse and worse.
Initially, Jindal wanted to be seen as a new kind of Republican, a GOPer for the Obama era. Needless to say, Jindal’s Indian ancestry was a component of this framing. But so was his allegedly fearsome intellect, which earned him degrees from Brown and Oxford and made him a Rhodes scholar. When his disastrous TV debut necessitated he shed that persona in favor of another, however, Jindal decided to go the other way, presenting himself as the ultimate anti-tax governor. He proposed Louisiana scrap income taxes altogether, but in part because his plan made up the revenue difference with sales taxes, which disproportionately hit the middle and working classes, the policy achieved little beyond sinking his approval rating. It remains low to this day.
After President Obama’s reelection in 2012, Jindal seemed to think he had another chance to claim the mantle of Sensible Republican. He charged out of the gate in 2013 with a call for the GOP to “stop being the stupid party,” which was, as you might imagine, not particularly well-received by the people who thought he was calling them stupid. Having seen his latest attempt fizzle out nearly as soon as it had started, Jindal proceeded to lay low for a while, but did little to change the perception that he still intended to run for president. Over the past few weeks, though, we’ve gotten a sense of what the latest version of Bobby Jindal might look like. And it isn’t pretty.
Lately, the man who urged his fellow Republicans to stop being stupid has grabbed headlines by pandering to the Islamophobic sentiment that’s widespread among the fundamentalist Christian bloc of the GOP base. The first sign was Jindal’s embrace of a paranoid fantasy that’s increasingly popular among far-right Christians, the supposed prevalence in the United Kingdom and Europe of “no-go” zones. These zones, according to the McCarthyite narrative, are neighborhoods or regions that have become so dominated by Muslim immigrants (and, of course, Shariah Law) that non-Muslims dare not enter them. The whole idea is a hysterical exaggeration, so much so that even Fox News has apologized for disseminating it. But Jindal has refused to downplay the no-go threat, despite being unable to point to any real examples.
If Jindal had left it there, you could have chalked it up as a momentary lapse in judgment, coupled with the typical arrogance of powerful men who are not accustomed to admitting they’re wrong. But he didn’t leave it there; he took it much further. He not only went on to flaunt his defiance on Fox News, promising he would never “tiptoe around the truth” when it came to “radical Islamic terrorism,” but also made clear that his turn to angry tribalism was no accident by grousing that he was “ready for us to stop calling ourselves hyphenated-Americans.” What connection there was between these two fearful mental spasms (it would be too charitable to call them thoughts) was unclear — until, that is, Jindal was able to get to what seemed to be his real message, which was little more than a nativist rant:
My parents came over here 40 years ago, they wanted their kids to be Americans, they love India, they love our heritage, if they wanted us to be Indians, they would have stayed in India. We also need to be teaching our kids in civics, in our schools about American Exceptionalism. We need to insist on English as our language in this country. I have nothing against anybody who wants to come here to be an American, but if people don’t want to come here to integrate and assimilate, what they’re really trying to do is set up their own culture, their communities, what they’re really trying to do is overturn our culture.
Unsurprisingly, the governor’s attempt to explicitly intertwine the conservative base’s dual fears of Muslims and immigrants was met with cheers from some of the more xenophobic and fear-stricken of conservatism’s leading lights. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, for example, took a break from promoting torture to praise Jindal for his “Reaganesque” vision and willingness to call out the Islamic enemy within. But if Bobby Jindal wants his impending campaign for president to resonate outside the confines of National Review, his new persona is his most embarrassing miscalculation yet. Pretending to be a combination non-white Joe Arpaio and Christian Pamela Geller may do wonders for Jindal’s standing among the religious fundamentalists in the GOP, but to those of us who think America has more serious concerns than creeping Shariah, it makes him look like a fool. At best.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, January 30, 2015
“Heading Towards A GOP Train Wreck”: You’re Going To See The Republican Party With All Their Clothes Off
Does anyone else see a train wreck coming for this Republican Congress?
House Ways and Means Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) will lead along with two other top committee chairs a Republican task force to come up with a plan in case the Supreme Court strikes a blow to Obamacare later this year…
They will be tasked with working up an alternative plan if the Supreme Court invalidates tax credits in the 30-plus states that use HealthCare.gov, as well as a more general Obamacare alternative if the law were to be repealed…
Coming in the opposite direction is this train:
There is internal dissent on whether Republicans ought to come up with an alternative. One congressional GOP health aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said his party is as determined as ever to fight Obamacare, and will remain so as long as it exhibits failure. He said devising an alternative is fraught with the difficulty of crafting a new benefits structure that doesn’t look like the Affordable Care Act.
“If you want to say the further and further this gets down the road, the harder and harder it gets to repeal, that’s absolutely true,” the aide said. “As far as repeal and replace goes, the problem with replace is that if you really want people to have these new benefits, it looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act. … To make something like that work, you have to move in the direction of the ACA. You have to have a participating mechanism, you have to have a mechanism to fund it, you have to have a mechanism to fix parts of the market.”
Pushing on the accelerator of both trains is this:
Leaders in the GOP-controlled House and Senate see the court challenge as their best hope for tearing apart a law they have long opposed. If the court strikes down the subsidies, Democrats are expected to clamor for lawmakers to pass a measure correcting the language in the law to revive them. Congressional Republicans say there is no possibility they would allow that.
“No, no, no, no;” said Sen. Dan Coats (R., Indiana).
Rep. McDermott came up with a different analogy.
GOP congressional leaders haven’t coalesced around a specific replacement for the law should the court strike down the subsidies. Democrats say that makes them vulnerable, and plan to paint the GOP as responsible for taking away benefits that millions already receive.
“What you’re going to see is the Republican party with all their clothes off,” said Rep. Jim McDermott (D., Wash.) “They are standing out there naked as a jaybird and they are going to have to stand up and explain, ’Well, now we got rid of it – now what do we do?’”
It would all be humorous if it weren’t so terribly tragic.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 31, 2015
“In The Same Situation”: Mitt Romney Isn’t Running In 2016. Now What?
Three weeks after throwing the early competition for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination into chaos by announcing that he was “seriously considering” joining the race, Mitt Romney announced on Friday morning that he would not launch a third bid for the White House.
“After putting considerable thought into making another run for president, I’ve decided it is best to give other leaders in the party the opportunity to become our next nominee,” Romney told a group of staffers and supporters.
Romney’s decision was probably a good one; although he led most of his Republican rivals in the polls, that advantage was largely built on name recognition. The vulnerabilities that sank him in the 2012 general election still exist, and the conservatives who will play an outsized role in picking the 2016 nominee still distrust him. Furthermore, Romney’s plan to rebrand himself as an anti-poverty warrior would have been tough to buy, due to his longstanding reputation for flip-flopping (and his flat acknowledgement in 2012 that “I’m not concerned about the very poor”).
There are some obvious winners in the wake of his decision: Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker will now be able to compete for the moderate-leaning, pro-business Republicans who have long favored Romney. The former Massachusetts’ governor’s staffers and donor base will now be up for grabs as well.
But Republicans still find themselves in the same situation they were in before Romney ever floated a third run: with a crowded, unsettled field.
A Public Policy Polling survey released Friday illustrates the tumultuous state of the race. It polled the Republican field both with and without Romney, and found that his staying on the sidelines leaves the GOP in a free-for-all fight for the nomination. With Romney’s supporters reallocated to their second choices, Bush leads the field with 21 percent. Former surgeon-turned-Tea Party activist Ben Carson trails with 16 percent, followed by Walker at 14 percent, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee at 12 percent, and Texas senator Ted Cruz at 10 percent.
In other words, it’s anyone’s game.
Republicans do have some incentive to figure things out sooner rather than later, however. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton appears unlikely to face a serious primary challenge, leaving her free to coast and raise money as the Republicans batter each other in their primary contests. While there’s a compelling case to be made that tough primaries make stronger candidates, that’s a scenario that Republicans would still clearly rather avoid.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, January 30, 2015
“The Next Palin Is In Your Pigsty”: She May Not Field Dress A Moose, But She Castrates Pigs
Before the 2016 campaign for president could even begin in earnest, the greatest political romance of our times has already died. And it could make all the difference next November.
In a turn that was perhaps inevitable but nonetheless remarkable, Sarah Palin delivered a hyped-up speech (at Iowa’s high-profile Freedom Summit) that drew disappointing reviews from within her own base of support.
To the surprise of no one, Palin’s critics blew a gasket straining to capture the extent of their contempt for the warmed-over address. An apparent TelePrompTer malfunction — the nightmare of pols ten times more polished and canny than Palin — only added to their sense of gleeful horror.
But with her rambling rehash of familiar tropes and postures, Palin finally outlasted the patience and goodwill of her own core constituency — the red-meat grassroots and the movement conservative media. Without any infrastructure, without any institutional platform, Palin could always count on her brand of performance art to put going rogue back in vogue. No longer.
Small-time soap opera, you say. End of an error. Actually, this is a big deal. Because the Palin phenomenon — the popularity, the opportunism, the branding, and, yes, the politics — all arose from a single source. Palin’s importance wasn’t as a new kind of conservative, ideologically speaking. It was as a new kind of politician.
There had never been a Republican or a Democrat with Palin’s combination of personality, character, youthfulness, and very specifically gendered sort of sex. Even to the critics, she didn’t come off as a pencil-necked weenie like Bobby Jindal or a sound-body-sound-mind orthogonian like Paul Ryan.
Being a woman helped. But, to borrow a line of analysis from critical theory, Palin wasn’t gendered the same way as other political women, in any party. She was no granny in a pantsuit, like Elizabeth Dole or Hillary Clinton. She doesn’t come off as fustily professional as Carly Fiorina or Meg Whitman. Palin’s character type can never be a career politician because she’s not even a career woman, in that stereotypical manner now apotheosized by Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer.
Palin’s life experience mattered because it betokened the entry into politics of a new kind of woman — equally into sports, guns, and kids. Palin’s character type eventually appeared to exist everywhere across the vast red swath of the American interior. Conservatives have long understood in what complex way their youthful women could be masculine without losing the femininity. (Tocqueville bemusedly praised American ladies’ “manly virtue.”) The revolution was in a conservative woman mobilizing that naturally grown manner in the arena of national politics.
However you choose to slice and dice gender identities, you must admit that Palin’s success arose from her own — and that losing her appeal in spite of it, much like earning an F in English, took a lot of willpower to pull off.
The failure was on glaring display when the right-leaning Washington Examiner went in search of praise for Palin’s prospects, but notable figures in the conservative mediasphere balked. Red-state stalwarts like HotAir’s Ed Morrissey sighed that her speech “wasn’t well prepared”; Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades HQ said simply: “She is done.”
Voices like these, once locked into mutual admiration with the rogue Republican who decried the “lamestream” media, can’t by themselves consign Palin to the political scrapheap. As they freely admit, however, the grassroots has “generally moved on,” too, in the words of Ben Domenech (whose website, The Federalist, I have written for).
So the essential question for 2016 is where, or whom, they’ll move on to. The tea party ethos that Palin helped midwife may be protean and loosely organized, but it hasn’t weakened much as a political force. This year’s crop of presumptive Republican candidates offers the conservative base its strongest, broadest, and most credible choices ever. Domenech could plausibly suggest to the Examiner that contenders with an outsider appeal, such as Gov. Scott Walker Or Sen. Ted Cruz, were well positioned to attract and energize Palin’s former constituency.
But character type is deeper, and it’s prior to politics. The true heir to Palin’s constituency will be a woman. How could it be otherwise?
It’s a question not lost on the Republican elite, which is smart enough to know there is no real reason Palin’s character type can’t be brought into a more establishmentarian alignment. Enter Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst — servicewoman, heartland heroine, and the no-brainer choice to respond to the president’s State of the Union on behalf of the whole Republican Party. Even a pig-castrating farm girl, you see, can find her way into the arms of such king- and queen-makers as Mitt Romney.
To her credit, Ernst possesses far more discipline than Palin, whose taste for guns did not extend into a longing for the military life. But if the whiff of the establishment gets too strong around her, the base will balk — just ask Marco Rubio. And the jilted Palin constituency will be up for grabs again.
By: James Poulos, The Daily Beast, January 29, 2015
“Guns On Campus”: Lawmakers Cooking Up Recipe For A Bloodbath
The very first bill being rammed through the Florida House of Representatives this year would allow guns to be carried on college campuses.
This screwball idea comes from Rep. Greg Steube, a young Republican from Sarasota. Remember his name in case he’s ever daft enough to run for statewide office.
In the macho comic-book world where Steube’s imagination dwells, armed college kids will stand ready to whip their pistols out of their book bags and shoot down crazed campus intruders with flawless aim.
This delusion has been nurtured by the National Rifle Association, which owns so many stooges in the Legislature that a dozen others would have been thrilled to introduce the campus gun bill, if Steube had balked.
Florida is currently one of 20 states that prohibit concealed weapons on university property, the wisdom being that firearms don’t belong in college classrooms, football stadiums or booze-soaked frat houses.
Most of the remaining states allow universities and colleges to decide their own firearms policies, and — no surprise — the vast majority of institutions don’t allow anyone but police officers to carry guns on campus.
Seven states do, thanks to the NRA. Florida is next on its list.
If Steube’s bill passes, it would open the way for firearms to be carried at private colleges as well as public universities, although each private school would be able to implement its own weapons ban.
Steube said he was working on his guns-at-college bill before the Nov. 20 shooting at Florida State University, where a mentally disturbed alumnus named Myron May shot and wounded two students and an employee at the school library.
Police arrived within minutes and killed May. Steube has speculated that an armed undergrad might have been able to drop him even quicker.
Or missed the shot completely and hit a bystander by mistake, which sometimes happens even when experienced police officers are pulling the triggers.
“School safety has always been the paramount issue I’ve dealt with,” said Steube, dead serious.
He’s eager to point out that only students with concealed-weapons permits would be allowed to pack heat. “These are 21-year-old adults who have gone through background checks, who have gone through training, who do not have a criminal record.”
Well, that certainly should reassure all worried parents, because 21 is the age of instant responsibility and maturity. Binge drinking, all-night partying, fighting — all that magically ends on a person’s 21st birthday, right?
And just because they lose their car keys now and then doesn’t mean they’d ever misplace a loaded Glock, or leave it out where their roommate could take it. You might wonder if Steube has ever set foot on a college campus. In fact, he has.
He graduated from the University of Florida, and stayed to get a law degree. During all that time in Gainesville he must have encountered at least a few fellow students who were unstable, angry, depressed, or battling drug and alcohol abuse.
In other words, troubled young men and women who shouldn’t be sitting in a classroom (or anywhere else) with a loaded weapon.
This would be a nightmare scenario for families who’ve sent their kids off to college believing they’ll be safe, at least while they’ve got a book in their hands. It’s also a nightmare scenario for teachers and professors, who’d be left to assume that every student in every class is armed. Would you give any grade except an A+ to a sophomore with a semiautomatic?
Most student and faculty groups are appalled by Steube’s campus gun bill, for good reason. It’s a recipe for another bloodbath.
A House subcommittee endorsed the measure last week, each Republican on the panel voting yea under the hawkish eye of the NRA. Luckily, there are more sane and cautious voices in the Florida Senate, where a similar piece of nutball legislation was snuffed four years ago.
At that time, John Thrasher, an influential Republican senator, opposed the push to put guns on college grounds. He had a friend whose daughter had been tragically killed in an accidental shooting at FSU.
Although Thrasher left the Senate last fall, he still has powerful friends in that chamber who pay attention to his opinion.
And they should, because Thrasher is now president of FSU. He started on the job 11 days before Myron May went to the library and started shooting.
The rampage didn’t change Thrasher’s mind about the danger of arming students. That’s because he lives in the real world, not the Bruce Willis fantasy inhabited by Steube and his reckless cohorts in the House.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, January 29, 2015
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