BATON ROUGE, La. — As a practicing Roman Catholic, Louisiana’s Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, knows a lot about repentance and penance. And in an interview last Wednesday at the governor’s mansion, Jindal sounded a lot like a preacher listing the sins of a party he hopes will soon see the light.

What lessons should the GOP learn from the last two election cycles? “The party must consistently do what it says,” Jindal admonished. “You can’t be the party of fiscal discipline and tolerate the kind of spending that our party has accepted in the last several years, especially in Washington. … If the Democrats had proposed many of the spending initiatives and projects that Republicans ended up approving, we would have been the first to criticize them.”