Posted on 02/28/2014 7:57:29 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s latest moves indicate he is gearing up for a presidential bid.
Though Jindal skewered Mitt Romney just a week after the 2012 election, he’s now turning to the Romney camp in an effort to beef up his fundraising operation. Sources say he is looking to tap Romney’s vast donor network and has asked Romney’s finance director, Spencer Zwick, for an assist with introductions to some of the Romney campaign’s top givers.
A number of the GOP’s likely Republican presidential candidates, including Rand Paul, are looking to Zwick to make these introductions. That’s in part a rite of passage – presidential contenders always want access to the fundraising list compiled by the previous candidate – and in part because the Romney team, which opted out of the public-financing system, was able to raise over $1 billion, an unprecedented amount for a GOP candidate. Romney and Zwick’s stable of top-dollar donors also has an especially loyal reputation relative to that of other nominees from both parties.
Jindal has said publicly he doesn’t know whether he’ll run in 2016, but at the end of 2013 he announced the creation of a nonprofit group, America Next, that will help him bolster his credentials as a thought leader within the Republican party ahead of the 2016 election. As he serves out his second term as governor, which ends in January 2016, it can also serve as something of a shadow campaign organization.
Thus far, the governor has staffed it like one. Though America Next will churn out conservative policy proposals, Jindal’s first organizational hire was Jill Neunabor, who ran the Romney campaign in Iowa during the general election and, during the primaries, served as deputy campaign manager in New Hampshire. Last month, he brought on a more traditional choice for a policy organization: former Jim DeMint staffer and Heritage Foundation scholar Chris Jacobs.
At the annual meeting of the Republican Governor’s Association earlier this week, Jindal injected himself back into the national conversation, surfacing in the nation’s capital with dramatic flair. Emerging from a White House meeting with President Obama, he got just a few steps down the driveway before calling the president’s failure to approve the Keystone pipeline tantamount to “waving the white flag of surrender” and assailing him for creating a “minimum-wage economy.”
RGA chairman Chris Christie’s absence from the organization’s news conference on Monday also allowed Jindal, the RGA’s vice chairman, to commandeer the event. He took a subtle jab at Christie, his potential 2016 rival and the man who in 2012 beat him out for this year’s RGA chairmanship. The RGA is “more important than just any one governor,” Jindal said.
“It’s not about the chairman,” he continued. “It wasn’t about the chairman when I was chairman last year. It’s not about the chairman this year.” (Jindal served as the chairman of the Republican Governors Association in 2013, overseeing the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey.)
— Eliana Johnson is media editor of National Review Online.
Milquetoast. No thanks.
I could live with Bobby Jindal on the GOP Ticket for VEEP. A Cruz/Jindal Ticket? Yeah... works for me.
I’ll take a big, fat pass on Bobby.
I respect the job he has done as Governor, but my dog is more adept at public speaking.
Thanks, but no thanks. This would be a disaster.
Stands zero chance. Wet noodle in an oversized suit.
Like it or not, people vote for candidates in large part because of charisma. And Jindal has next to none.
aaaahhh, I don’t think so. I’ll pass on him
I’ll have him for HHS Secretary ( assuming the department hasn’t been closed down yet ).
In some photos, he even looks uncomfortably like Obama.
Just another aspiring third-tier loser candidate to screw up the GOP primaries again and split the conservative vote....for no other reason than ego.
Leni
Jindal does not much appeal.
I don’t know anyone who thinks quicker on his feet than Bobby Jindal. Or much smarter than him. He is Cruz’s equal in intelligence. I’m constantly amazed at all the facts he has on command. When he speaks he rarely slips into duhs and uhs. The best at that is Linda Lingle ( ex rep gov of Hawaii).
Once again too many of us are letting the other side define a good man.
I would go nuts over any ticket that had Cruz or Jindal or Palin in any order on that ticket.
Jindal would be the “Silent Cal” type candidate.
I’m reading Calvin Coolidge by Amity Shales.
This country needs a “Silent Cal.”
Reagan put the portraits of Washington, Andrew Jackson, Eisenhower, and Coolidge in his Cabinet room.
It’s a bizarro world when folks term Bobby Jindal odd looking and would vote in old hag Hildabeast.
I have a lot of respect for Jindal, but he just doesn’t have the titanium cojones needed the national stage, IMHO.
“Needed for” the national stage...
What kind of cojones does our current President have?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.