With fatal flaw, Gov. Jindal ends his presidential bid
23rd November 2015 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
“Bobby Jindal could have been the greatest Governor Louisiana ever had,” former Louisiana Democratic Insurance Commis-sioner and Sec. State Jim Brown observed to this newspaper.
Brown noted how Jindal’s incredible intellect once offered such promise. His willingness to come up with innovative ideas marked his career prior to ascending to the Governor’s Mansion in such a way that Jindal seemed uniquely able to draw the best ideas of Right and Left into a new innovative synthesis. From assuming the Department of Health and Hospitals at 24, non-ideological transformative innovation was his specialty.
What if Jindal had continued on that path, instead of tailoring his every political move for the last eight years towards pleasing GOP primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire? Could the Louisiana Governor have been the font of solutions to the Pelican State’s intractable problems? Did the fatal flaw of hopeless ambition bend the Rhodes scholar into a conservative caricature of himself?
If so, sculpting himself into the ideal GOP White House contender did not work. Jindal withdrew from the 2016 Presidential race late Tuesday, saying that running has “been an honor, but this is not my time.”
The Governor explained that his candidacy did not take off because “We spent a lot of time developing detailed policy papers and given this crazy, unpredictable election season clearly there just wasn’t a lot of interest in those policy papers.”
Big reform ideas once drove Jindal, and he hoped such transformative policy notions could propel his chances in the crowded 2016 field. Truthfully, though, Donald Trump proved less of a liability to the Louisianian’s campaign than the fact that Jindal had already abandoned ‘big ideas’ as Governor when they conflicted with the possibility of playing the role of conservative darling on the national campaign trail.
Running for Governor, Jindal told the Editorial Board of The Louisiana Weekly, “It is ridiculous to have the conversation, as some [Republicans] do, whether everyone should have health insurance. Of course everyone should have health insurance. The question is how to do it.”
A GOP candidate had declared that universal health coverage was his goal. He spoke of merging free market ideas with liberal goals for a new social justice paradigm. The editors of this newspaper were so impressed by this post-partisan viewpoint that they rewarded Jindal with The Louisiana Weekly endorsement in his initial unsuccessful race against Kathleen Blanco and in his winning bid four years later.
“It’s the only endorsement I have ever regretted,” said Weekly Publisher Renette Dejoie-Hall. “I was taken in.”
Was he a fake, though, or had Jindal—who at 24 designed new Medicaid funding methods for Louisiana’s hospitals and then at 30 re-crafted Medicare—simply forgotten his ambition to find answers, if they might complicate his run for President?
Louisiana’s Governor justified his rejection of the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act in 2010, saying that broadening an inefficient government-run healthcare system would saddle the state budget with huge costs when the federal contribution ticked down to 90%.
Yet Jindal had spent his term as La. Secretary of Heath and Hospitals under Governor Mike Foster finding innovative means to utilize Medicaid dollars. Much of his hospital reform plan was predicated on the idea that these government monies could be employed in unforeseen ways—which is why Foster chose an untested 24-year-old in the first place for the job.
Contrast Louisiana’s outright rejection of the Medicaid expansion with Arkansas’ and Arizona’s conditional acceptance. Arkansas’ Republican legislature and Democratic Governor got together and said they would take the expanded Medicaid funds if the monies could be redirected into the state’s Health Care exchange—devised under the ACA. In other words, use the federal funds to provide private health insurance to poorer people over and beyond what the federal subsidies in Obamacare provided.
The idea provided a conservative solution to a liberal aspiration. Jindal might have embraced the reform spirit of our neighboring state.
In a matter of speaking, he did. After all, the Arkansas plan was basically Jindal’s idea.
In the late 1990s as staff director of the Breaux Commission on reforming Medicare, Jindal proposed utilizing Medicare dollars to provide private health insurance purchased through an exchange as a means to reduce long-term growth of the program for retirees, and provide better health care solutions (such as covering eye glasses and contact lenses, currently not a Medicare item.)
Jindal could have justified his apostasy on embracing part of Obamacare by asking the White House for a waiver, as Arkansas, did, and by stating he took Medicaid to fund conservative healthcare reforms in Louisiana which he had embraced federally with Medicare in the 1990s. As for the cost of the program, which Louisiana would have to increasingly shoulder in the coming decade, he could have taken an idea from Arizona’s GOP Gov. Jan Brewer.
Give hospitals millions more to cover the uninsured they are currently treating and then tax back five percent of that amount to cover the state contribution to Medicaid. Let the federal money pay for the federal money, so to speak, was Arizona’s idea. The White House green-lighted that notion too.
Yet, Jindal became so fixated on the idea that he would be the next GOP candidate for President that conducting any type of compromise with the Left became inconceivable. The Greeks defined tragedy as a hero of exceptional talent undermined by a tragic flaw.
Consider a “half measure” that might not have gone a long way with the conservative electorate on the campaign trail in Iowa, but would have made a big difference in Louisiana. Jindal’s ill-fated income tax to sales tax swap was a means to establish his reform fiscal conservative bonafides to GOP primary voters in a bid for President.
It just would have created a billion dollars in structural deficits. In order to work, a .04 cents hike in sales taxes would have been needed rather than .025 cents to replace all income taxes revenue neutrally. Even the most conservative legislator shied away for giving most Pelican State voters the highest sales tax rate in the nation by a factor of three pennies on the dollar.
However, Jindal could have scaled back his plan to the one portion that proved to have some bipartisan support. Raising cigarette taxes to the national average, from their previously low level, would have produced almost $200 million, or the amount Louisiana collects in income taxes from those over the age of 65. Raising cigarette taxes to this level was part of Jindal’s plan initially, but when he could not enact his ‘big bang’ reform, he backed away from a smaller proposal that could have gained support on the Left and Right.
The Governor sought only big ideas on which he could run for President. Sometimes he succeeded. He was willing to court controversy at home, if it played well in Iowa and New Hampshire. Take his most notable reform in education where 170,000 schoolchildren escaped failing schools. Creating the largest private school voucher program in the nation, whether one agrees with the idea or not, still proves that Jindal could achieve major change when he set his mind to it.
Put aside the debate over the efficacy of neighborhood public schools versus private school vouchers for a moment. There is a thoughtful debate to be had as to whether taking those monies out of local school districts affects the students left behind. Nevertheless, there is one undeniable fact. Numerous polls of parents of those children who attend private or parochial schools reveal their higher levels of satisfaction with the education that their kids receive.
Considering that vast majority of these parents are African-American registered Democrats who are unlikely to vote for a Republican like Jindal, one still must acknowledge that the passage of school vouchers—to attend mostly existing Catholic schools—did little in the way to get Jindal votes in Louisiana or reward an existing GOP Pelican State electorate.
But it sure looked good on the campaign trail with Evangelical conservatives in Iowa, in a way that applying his talents to removing dedicated funding locks in the state budget—the root of Louisiana’s structural deficit—could never be articulated.
The irony is that Jindal likely missed his chance to run for President in 2012. In a statement announcing his exit from the 2016 race, Jindal said running has “been an honor, but this is not my time.”
Had he opted to stand against Mitt Romney, Jindal might have emerged as a conservative alternative in a way that Rick Santorum could never. Jindal running at a time before Louisiana manifested its huge budget deficits and fiscal problems might have proved an acceptable standard-bearer to the GOP establishment who would not embrace the Right-wing former Pennsylvania U.S. Senator.
More critically, the rank and file Republican voter might have grown giddy at the possibility of a young 41-year-old Indian American policy wonk running against a sitting African-American President. Jindal in 2012 could have captured the conservative electorate’s imagination in a way against Obama in a way he could never against Hillary Clinton. And he would have had a reform message untainted by the $500,000,000 deficits that appeared after four years of neglect and half measures.
Retrospect, however, is always 20/20. Strangely, Jindal wrote his own epitaph. When asked whom he would endorse, he replied, “I don’t think people care.”
Well, at least one other Republican cared, when it came to the timing of the announcement of his withdrawal from the presidential race. In the last week of his gubernatorial bid, David Vitter was desperate to dominate the news cycle and attract wavering GOP voters through his nativist plea to reject Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris bombings.
Jindal’s end to his Presidential bid dominated the newswires. Vitter was forgotten for a crucial day.
Of course turnabout is fair play. David Vitter conducted his now-infamous “serious sin” press conference in 2007 on the same day as Bobby Jindal launched his bid for Governor, robbing all attention away. Last week, Jindal returned the favor. Ironic, if the Republican wunderkind’s final political act was to aid a Democratic gubernatorial candidate.
This article originally published in the November 23, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
