Winnfield, Louisiana
In many ways, Bobby Jindal’s appearance in a small meeting room on Main Street at the center of this rural town of 5,000 was a typical campaign event. There were “Bobby Jindal” banners on the walls and enthusiastic volunteers in yellow “Bobby Jindal” polo shirts. There were homemade baked goods and there were red-white-and-blue balloons. There was the eager campaign aide who clapped loudly at all of the candidate’s applause lines in order to encourage others to do the same. And Jindal, the second-term Republican congressman running for governor again after losing narrowly four years ago, gave a rousing speech filled with lines sure to appeal to some of the most conservative voters in America.
“In Mississippi, they said: ‘If you loot, we’ll shoot,'” he says approvingly of that state’s response to post-Katrina crime. “In Louisiana, they confiscated guns from more than 1,000 law-abiding citizens.”
The members of the audience share his indignation, and he reminds them that he has won the endorsements of the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association, the NRA, and the Fraternal Order of Police.
“Our most important priority has to be protecting our children. Do you know that the minimum sentence for a convicted child molester in Louisiana is one year?” Jindal says. Murmurs of disbelief come from the small crowd. “And the minimum sentence for online predators is two years?”
A leather-faced man standing near the back of the room offers an angry harrumph. He nudges the man next to him, who is wearing a shiny gold-star badge on his belt. The sheriff shakes his head: perverts.
“They brag about the fact that you can go on the Internet and see block-by-block where these child molesters live,” says Jindal, preparing the audience for the payoff of his tough-on-crime campaign–a positive reference to “The Farm,” Louisiana’s often-controversial state penitentiary. “It would be much better if we found out they were all living in the same place–in Angola, far away from all children.”
The crowd shouts its approval. There’s a vigorous “Damn right!” from the far side of the room. And Jindal continues with a monumental promise: He will end the corruption that has characterized Louisiana politics for generations. He says this standing in front of a huge mural featuring the three governors who went to Baton Rouge from Winn Parish: Huey Long, O.K. Allen, and Earl Long.
Jindal is small next to those larger-than-life figures. He is relatively short and extraordinarily thin–not surprising for someone who sometimes wakes up at 4 A.M. to exercise. If it weren’t for the occasional strand of gray hair on his head, he could pass for 16 years old.
Jindal is different from those former governors in another way, too: His skin is brown. That’s not an advantage in a state that gave David Duke 44 percent of its vote in 1990.
If Jindal, the son of immigrants from India, is to win the Louisiana governor’s race, he will need the enthusiasm he generates at his events to translate into votes. His first opportunity to win comes this month in an open primary.
Some voters are actually casting their ballots this week, in the state’s first election featuring early voting; then Louisianans will go to the polls en masse on October 20. If Jindal gets more than 50 percent of that vote, he’s governor. If he doesn’t, the two top vote-getters will face each other in a runoff next month. Although several recent polls have shown him with a lead large enough to give him a victory in the primary, Jindal’s campaign is preparing to intensify its work through November.
That’s smart. In 2003, Jindal won 33 percent of the first-round vote and faced Democrat Kathleen Blanco (who took 18 percent) in the runoff. Although polls showed him ahead by some 11 points in the days leading up to the election, he lost 52-48 percent.
Jindal had come from nowhere to qualify for that runoff. When he started what many regarded as a quixotic campaign for governor, he was 32 and drawing 3 percent in the polls. He had an impressive résumé–he was Louisiana’s secretary of health and hospitals at 24 and president of the University of Louisiana system at 28. But while Jindal’s work was well known to opinion leaders in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, to voters in outlying areas he was unfamiliar and different. Says one Republican strategist, “If David Duke did well in a parish, Bobby did poorly.”
In the four years since his defeat, Jindal has worked hard to change that. His election to the House of Representatives in 2004 raised his public profile, and he has spent countless Sunday mornings traveling to churches throughout rural Louisiana talking about his conversion to Catholicism.
Those trips and the familiarity they bred came in handy this summer when the Louisiana Democratic party launched an attack on Jindal and his faith. A television ad that aired in heavily Protestant northern and central Louisiana accused Jindal of intolerance toward non-Catholics in writings dating back to the mid 1980s. “He wrote articles that insulted thousands of Louisiana Protestants,” said the narrator.
The backlash was swift, in part because the ad was brazenly dishonest even by the low standards of campaign attacks. Clergy from around the state spoke out in defense of Jindal, including many individuals who had hosted him at their churches and who had discussed his faith with him at some length.
There are more attacks coming. In 2003, Democrats aired an us-versus-them ad in the final days of the runoff campaign that proved decisive. The ad featured a stark warning: “Wake Up, Louisiana.” As the screen showed a young, dark Bobby Jindal, the narrator intoned: “They hope we don’t wake up until it’s too late.”
Democrats have tried to use Jindal’s ethnicity against him in this race, too. The Louisiana Democratic party for months insisted on using Jindal’s given name, Piyush, in its press releases. (National Democrats cried foul, and were right to do so, when Republicans tried using Barack Obama’s middle name–Hussein.)
Julie Vezinot, the party’s spokeswoman, insisted that it wasn’t meant to draw attention to Jindal’s race. “It’s his real name. It is not race-baiting,” she told Newhouse newspapers. “I see Bobby Jindal as presenting a façade. I think it is important to let people know who he is, . . . to say this is what he actually is rather than the image he presents to the public.”
In an interview aboard his campaign bus as we traveled between parishes last week, I asked Jindal about race. He did not want to talk about it and says that national reporters and commentators seem to spend a lot more time on his ethnicity than Louisianans do. When I point out that those same analysts believe he underperformed in rural areas in 2003 in part because of his race, he scoffs. “I don’t think race is the reason I lost,” he insists. “The more familiar voters were with me, the better we did.”
Which explains why he has spent four years getting acquainted with these voters. The unspoken message is simple: I’m just like you.
At a campaign stop in Ville Platte, the crowd includes lots of people wearing the purple and yellow of the LSU Tigers. “LSU is ranked number one in the country,” Jindal says, in his soft Louisiana accent. “We’re going to beat Florida this weekend and beat them again in Atlanta,” he adds, referring to the site of the 2007 SEC championship game. It is a passing reference in a relatively unimportant part of his speech. But it reinforces the fact that despite his brown skin and his Ivy League degree and his Rhodes scholarship, Bobby Jindal is just like them.
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
