Bobby Jindal's Downside (Jindal as POTUS? Take a closer look at his record as Louisiana governor)

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is busy promoting his new tome Leadership and Crisis with book tour stops all over the country. This latest tour comes on top of his previous speaking tours to raise campaign cash for himself and various Republican candidates around the country. The only place Governor Jindal has trouble visiting is his home state of Louisiana. The joke in Louisiana is that Bobby is known as a governor in 49 states.

Governor Jindal is intelligent and very well-educated, and he manages to look like a creditable leader during a crisis. In this he learned well from former Governor Kathleen Blanco's disastrous handling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. He can spout numerous statistics off the top of his head and make complicated situations understandable.

However, as we've learned from the current occupant of the White House, command of statistics and the ability to explain the complicated do not necessarily indicate that one is destined to be a great leader.

Louisiana's last budget was balanced with numerous accounting tricks, one-time funding sources, and massive cuts to health and higher education. Jindal has been criticized for pushing hard decisions down the road to avoid offending anyone in preparation for a presidential bid, and it is well-known in Louisiana that Jindal is preparing to run and campaigning across the country on trips funded by Louisiana taxpayers.

Louisiana is a populist state that tends to overspend in flush times and flail in lean times. In Louisiana, health and higher education are not constitutionally protected from budget cuts and are routinely savaged when the economy dives. To be fair, there is a great deal of waste in higher education that needs to be eliminated, and LSU professors are not helping their cause by threatening to unionize in a state where unions are not looked on favorably. Also, LSU System President Dr. John Lombardi, Louisiana's highest-paid state employee, recently refused to trim his salary for the good of the school and further exposed the hypocrisy in Louisiana higher education.

During Jindal's administration, Louisiana has added over 3,100 new employees, and its budget has increased from $12 billion in 2008 to $24 billion in 2010. The governor seems to think this surge in state government will somehow conquer the budget in the long run.

When it comes to cutting spending, the governor can't cut even his own travel budget. One of Governor Jindal's favorite Louisiana campaign tactics is local church attendance by helicopter in rural areas rarely visited by any governor.

Jindal's celebrated ethics legislation promoting transparency in Louisiana government has backfired (see also here): it has been revealed that enforcement powers were stripped from the Ethics Board, resulting in several resignations in protest, and Jindal has zealously guarded the records of the governor's office from the light of day. The law's most notable accomplishment has been to drive worthy citizens away from serving on state boards by requiring draconian disclosures of every conceivable financial detail and close association in a futile effort to prevent political corruption. Are you kidding? This is Louisiana!

Governor Jindal devotes a sizable portion of Leadership and Crisis to detailing Louisiana's natural beauty, recounting political anecdotes, and listing boilerplate conservative talking points without ever mentioning his plans to deal with the state's looming $1.5-billion budget shortfall or the numerous challenges faced by Louisiana as its graduates flee in search of opportunities the state can't provide.

Jindal doesn't seem to understand is that status quo governing is currently not in vogue. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is talked about as presidential material precisely because of his willingness to shake up New Jersey's insular political culture without thought of higher office. Christie is willing to take on the special interests and make the hard choices New Jersey needs to survive, while Jindal is doing his best not to offend any powerful interests in Louisiana. This type of timid leadership is exactly what the Tea Parties are railing against.

Those promoting or considering Bobby Jindal as presidential material need to take a much closer look at his record as Louisiana governor. Jindal talks the talk, but he doesn't walk the walk.

Hat tip: C.B. Forgotston

Tom Roberson is an independent conservative holding finance and engineering degrees and doing his small part to save his country.

Yes, if someone ever says something false about you, I will correct it, in order that the facts be known. I certainly won’t do it to “defend” you. If you were to post something else stupid, like “Mitt Romney was Governor of Utah”, I would correct your error, and that would not be “defending Romney”. It’s not that I “say” I’m not defending, it’s the FACT that I’m not.

And if somebody posts any other stupid drivel in the hopes it will smear Romney, or any other candidate, I will correct the stupid drivel, because stupid drivel has no place on a forum that people use to find facts.

I don’t really care that you seem clueless on so many things, or that you seem not to understand the simplest ideas. I could spend all my waking hours and never correct every stupid, rediculous thing you say about me.

I do however feel compelled to point out when you deliberately lie. The funny thing is, I suppose you could actually be delusional enough to actually believe the lies you tell. But I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you are doing it on purpose.

ON the other hand, you did manage to post an entire comment without actually lying. And in fact, in your own pathetic way, you may have posted what for you passes as within the realm of possibility, mostly because you have turned to predicting the future, and it is in fact likely that at some point people WILL post stupid, false stories and insist they are the “facts”, and I WILL point out things that are factually incorrect.

On the other hand, Romney mostly becomes the subject on threads these days because obsessed people like you keep bringing him up again and again and again. I would prefer never to see the name Romney on FreeRepublic — if the place is going to ban discussion of Romney, we aught to ban all discussion of Romney, and be done with it, rather than have the anti-Romney trolls spamming everybody’s threads like this.

This thread was about Bobby Jindal, and you drug your Romney obsession in and ruined the thread. You regularly drag your fixation with Romney into threads.

Your proximate point was to lie that I was in this thread attacking palin supporters, and that I am anti-Palin, a lie you put forth with no evidence whatsoever.

In fact, in this thread I was defending the person who posted the thread against a false claim that they were anti-Palin. And I’m not against Sarah Palin, and in fact have posted numerous threads and comments defending her from attacks both from her opposition AND from her supposedly loyal supporters who say false bad things about her trying to “justify” her when she disagrees with them.

You have no evidence that I am against Sarah Palin. You have no evidence that I am in any way supporting Mitt Romney (whom I haven’t supported since he quit the 2008 presidential primary).

You have this bizarre belief that people are somehow attached to every candidate they ever voted for. Now, maybe you have some weird personal attachment to political candidates you decide to vote for, but most of us simply look through the field of candidates for an election, pick the one we think is least likely to screw up our country, and vote for them.

Here’s the funny thing amidst the general sadness which is your posting: You couldn’t do a better job of spamming threads for Romney if you bought advertising for him. Crazy guy hates Romney, and can’t stop mentioning Romney, and keeps pointing out all the sane people around him who “supported Romney”. And somehow you think this will make people hate Romney, and support YOUR candidate.

Meanwhile, you jump from thread to thread screaming”Romney Romney Romney” as if you are haunted by some spectre that you can’t get out of your head. I haven’t said one thing ABOUT Romney in this entire thread, and the only mention of Romney in this thread is yours, and my responses to yours. Here’s the funny thing amidst the general sadness which is your posting: You couldn’t do a better job of spamming threads for Romney if you bought advertising for him. Crazy guy hates Romney, and can’t stop mentioning Romney, and keeps pointing out all the sane people around him who “supported Romney”. And somehow you think this will make people hate Romney, and support YOUR candidate.

LOL, it must drive you nuts to see the anti-Romney video pasties atop every thread, that we often see here("advertising" in your mind), especially when followed by posts about freerepublic being "Palin country".

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