Jindal’s opening gambit

So, he’s running again, already.

In the week following the Presidential elections, Governor Piyush Amrit “Bobby” Jindal has indirectly announced his bid for the 2006 White House…along with his strategy for getting there.

Depending on how you take it, Gov. Jindal did one of three things in his statements during the past week. The governor: a) confirmed that most of the major positions and policies he has implemented in the state of Louisiana are dead wrong; b) confirmed that he is a lying opportunist, desperate to make the White House in the next election or; c) confirmed that he is suffering from a form of mental illness or brain degeneration that impacts how or if he recollects reality.

A possible fourth confirmation is that he thinks we are all stupid, that no one will connect his words with his actions and policies.

First, the governor who has virtually destroyed public education and higher education chastised his party for being its intellectual posture. “We have to stop being the stupid party,” he said in an interview. This, from the governor whose idea of improving education begins with dramatically cutting the budgets of schools at all levels, from kindergarten through grad school. He went on to say that his party had to stop allowing the rich to “keep their toys.”

Perhaps the governor either forgot or was repenting for blowing the billion-dollar surplus he inherited by increasing tax breaks to the very rich. The result is a crippled state budget and the decimation of vital programs in health, education, human services and other areas that the rich never have a problem paying for.

Then, when Mitt (sorest loser) Romney blamed his election loss on Obama’s alleged “gifts” to Blacks, Latinos and the young, Jindal used the opportunity to rebuff the candidate and the campaign he had been vigorously promoting three weeks ago.

“We have got to stop dividing the American voters,” thundered Jindal. “We need to go after 100 percent of the votes, not 53 percent… So I absolutely reject that notion…I don’t think that represents where we are as a party, where we’re going as a party,” said Jindal, in a sudden fit of amnesia. Jindal may not have trouble recalling his own actions as he crisscrossed the country (possibly at our expense) stumping for Romney during the campaign in an effort to become the golden boy…or brown boy…of his party. He also forgot his attacks on HBCUs in this state.

The governor may have vision and hearing impairment also. Or perhaps Jindal is not watching the same news reports that we are. Conservatives in all 50 states are playing the ultimate sore losers. They have filed petitions to secede from the union because they can’t handle four more years of a Black president. None of that “come together” or “one nation” stuff for the rabid Right. Romney’s comments absolutely reflect the mood and direction of the Republican Party.

Perhaps it’s all strategy and not illness.

By distancing himself from his landslide loser buddy, Jindal may believe that he is verbally positioning himself near center, which will give him a better chance at both his party’s nomination and the big prize…the White House. He may figure that the angry, tantrum-throwing conservatives will settle down in a couple of years, making a “reinvented,” politically born-again Jindal the man to beat for his party’s Oval Office bid four years from now.

But then, they’d have to be pretty dumb to fall for that. Wouldn’t they?

This article originally published in the November 19, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.