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What does Obama bin bama bring to the table that someone like LA Rep. Bobby Jindal does not?

(From Fred Barnes for the Weekly Standard by way of Powerline Blog):

Jindal has an extraordinary life story. His given first name is Piyush, but at age 4 he decided to change it to Bobby. In high school, he abandoned his parents' Hindu faith and converted to Catholicism. (His father is an engineer, his mother an assistant secretary in the Louisiana state labor department.) By the time he graduated from Baton Rouge High School, Jindal was a Republican. When he got to Brown--an eight-year medical program had attracted him--he naively asked about joining the College Republicans. There was no chapter at Brown. The Republican club Jindal subsequently helped found grew, he says, to 300 members, a surprisingly large membership for a liberal Ivy League school.

His post-Brown career has been dizzying. Instead of pursuing medicine, Jindal studied at Oxford for two years as a Rhodes Scholar, worked the next two years for McKinsey, the business consulting firm, and at age 24 returned to Baton Rouge to take over, at Foster's urging, the mammoth Department of Health and Hospitals. There, he transformed a $400 million deficit into a $220 million surplus...

He's issued lengthy position papers on health care, ethics, economic opportunity, the environment, schools, and religious faith. These were packaged together last week in a glossy 24-page booklet entitled "The Jindal Blueprint for Louisiana--A Bold New Vision." Most notable is the section on "defending the role of faith and values in our state." In it, he tells how a friend led him to Christian faith. "Today, my faith in Jesus Christ is central to who I am, and I pray regularly for God's wisdom in all the parts of my life," he says.

Jindal says he became a Republican as a teenager for two reasons. In Louisiana, with its history of political corruption, Republicans are the reform party. Also, they're the champions of opportunity. "I'd seen what great opportunity my father had [in America] as an engineer," he said in an interview. His mother has succeeded in state government, he said, and "I'm running for governor. This is an amazing country."

As Yogi Berra said of the election of a Jewish mayor of Dublin, "Only in America."

His bio from the biographical directory of the US Congress):

"JINDAL, Bobby, a Representative from Louisiana; born in Baton Rouge, East Baton Rouge Parish, La., June 10, 1971; B.S., Brown University, Providence, R.I., 1991; M.Litt., Oxford University, Oxford, England, 1994; secretary, Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals 1996-1998; appointed executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, 1998; president, University of Louisiana system, 1999; appointed Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Department of Health and Human Services by President George W. Bush on March 7, 2001; elected as a Republican to the One Hundred Ninth Congress (January 3, 2005-present)."

Does anyone think that if Jindal had won the governorship of LA instead of Blanco the farcical handling of Katrina would have occurred?

Now here is Obama's bio (from the biographical directory of the US Congress):

OBAMA, Barack, a Senator from Illinois; born in Honolulu, Hawaii, August 4, 1961; obtained early education in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Hawaii; continued education at Occidental College, Los Angeles, Calif., and Columbia University, New York City; studied law at Harvard University, where he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, and received J.D. in 1992; lecturer on constitutional law, University of Chicago; member, Illinois State senate 1997-2004; elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 2004 for term beginning January 3, 2005."

See the relative lack of accomplishment? And Jindal is a full TEN years younger than Obama!

The Republicans need to recognize a gem in their own party that could easily counter the hyped up Obama.