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.
Only the ones he borrows by having a personal mafia surround him-just like Nixon did. I didn’t say the idiot in chief had cojones-I said I think the country needs someone who does have them. And the current one has never been my president.
OK, next question -— given that you need the cojones to be President on the national stage and given that the current one doesn’t have any without the media inventing one for him, what in Jindal’s record as two-term governor tells us that he does not have the cojones at all?
These conservative Presidential wanna-bees need to get together, take an honest inventory of themselves, then choose the best candidate - for the good of the country.
What a disappointment he's turned out to be...
For those of you who think Jindal is too polite, his recent address to conservatives at the Reagan Library had me reconsidering this man. He is an equal (in terms of his intellect and speaking ability) to Ted Cruz, although he is less outspoken.....
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/war-religion-bobby-jindal-reagan/2014/02/13/id/552736
If all the wannabes do jump in, the debate stages will be so crowded that all they have time for is Yes or No questions from the moderators.
I’m not a cop collecting evidence, I’m stating my opinion on the subject, not attacking a position or demanding to know why someone else has another one...
His attitude in his speeches and news appearances-on Fox, before you ask-just don’t project a tough enough attitude across the board not to be intimidated by political bullies. Again, my opinion-I’m entitled to it, just as everyone else is entitled to theirs.
Milquetoast. No thanks.
And neither of his parents were US citizens when he was born. And even if they were; milquetoast is enough to make him lose. We need a strong, firey, courageous, principled, take-no-prisoners constitutionalist candidate who is eager to take on the GOPe.
If Jindal were on the ticket, I’d vote for him. He’s not 100% perfect, but between all the potential candidates so far, he’s at least in my top 3.
I’m terrified of another rino winning the primary in 2016. I think I threw up a little when I bubbled in Romney’s name for the election. He was about the last person I wanted in the primary, but I certainly wasn’t going to vote for Obama.
Jindal would be good, but I hope he’d be in a Cruz cabinet as Engery Sec.
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