Posted on 10/12/2003 10:04:43 AM PDT by AM2000
NEW ORLEANS
The election-night blowout at the Astor Crowne Plaza in the French Quarter last weekend was something rare in Republican politics: a truly biracial event. But even though 33 percent of Louisiana — and 67 percent of New Orleans — is black, there was scarcely a black reveler there. The mix of people celebrating Bobby Jindal's first-round win in this year's governor's race was an unusual one: whites and Indian-Americans.
California's new governor has been grabbing all the headlines, but Mr. Jindal's odyssey has been nearly as remarkable. At the age of 32, he has an almost freakishly impressive résumé: at 24, he was running Louisiana's hospital system. But perhaps more notable, in a state where an ex-Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, David Duke, made a real run for the governor's office, Mr. Jindal is the dark-skinned son of immigrants from India.
As Mr. Jindal moves on to a Nov. 15 runoff against Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco, he has a chance to make history. He would be the nation's first Indian-American governor, and one of the few elected officials from an ethnic group that now numbers nearly two million. And he would be Louisiana's first nonwhite governor since P. B. S. Pinchback served for 35 days during Reconstruction. But if Mr. Jindal's success is a sign of racial progress, and it is, it also has elements that suggest how far we still have to go.
Mr. Jindal, who was born in Baton Rouge, wasted little time adopting Louisiana ways. As a small child, he announced he was trading in his given name of Piyush for Bobby. In his teens, he converted to Catholicism. He then breezed through Brown University and became a Rhodes Scholar.
Gov. Mike Foster, who is prevented by term limits from running this year, appointed Mr. Jindal hospitals chief, and made him president at age 27 of the University of Louisiana system. Mr. Jindal was an assistant secretary of the Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services before announcing for governor. The fast-talking Mr. Jindal presented himself as a "problem solver," with conservative views, including opposition to affirmative action.
Mr. Jindal began the campaign with strong backing from Mr. Foster, but it still seemed his ethnicity might rule him out. Louisiana, which is barely 1 percent Asian, has little experience with Indian-Americans. And the South, historically fixated on blacks and whites, has had trouble knowing what to make of people who are neither. In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that Mississippi was within its rights to make Martha Lum, a Chinese girl, attend a "colored" school rather than a white one.
One black legislator dismissed Mr. Jindal's candidacy early on, calling him, according to The Associated Press, "too dark for the white folks, and not dark enough for the blacks." But that was wrong. It certainly seemed possible Mr. Jindal would be "too dark" for Louisiana whites, a majority of whom backed Mr. Duke in his runs for senator and governor in the early 1990's. But Mr. Jindal, who has been embraced by the religious right, apparently won upward of 40 percent of the white vote last week.
Nor was Mr. Jindal "not dark enough" for blacks. Whites like Senator Mary Landrieu have racked up as much as 96 percent of the black vote. Mr. Jindal's problem, and the reason his pioneering candidacy attracted only a handful of black votes last weekend, is his stand on the issues, and the fact that in a campaign filled with 18-point programs, he has scarcely addressed the special problems of Louisiana blacks.
Mr. Jindal's ethnicity, which has drawn little attention so far, could be a factor in the runoff. In last weekend's crowded field, Democratic candidates won 57 percent of the vote. To win, Ms. Blanco needs only to hold on to that base. But Mr. Jindal has to hunt for new support. He has made modest efforts to woo blacks but is unlikely to get far. To win, he will need overwhelming white support. If even a small percentage of white conservatives hold his ethnicity against him, it could cost him the election.
A win by Mr. Jindal would raise a different set of racial questions. Blacks who have run for governor in recent years got less than 35 percent of the vote. It may be that they were too liberal, but it may also be that the state remains resistant to a black governor. If Mr. Jindal wins, it may mean not that race no longer matters in Louisiana, but simply that — in a change from the days of Martha Lum — Asian-Americans now fall on the white side of the racial divide.
If Mr. Jindal is Louisiana's next governor, he will be hailed by national Republicans as a symbol of inclusion, a new Colin Powell or J. C. Watts. But he will be a hollow symbol if he ends the white lock on the governor's mansion despite overwhelming opposition from the state's blacks. If the Republican Party really wants to be inclusive, in Louisiana and nationally, it needs to start finding nonwhite candidates that nonwhites want to vote for.
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