WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH toured Stuart, Florida, after Hurricane Jeanne struck the town last September, he met an engineer from Louisiana working as a volunteer with the Federal Emergency Management Administration. “Do you know Bobby Jindal?” the man asked. The president did, recalling Jindal as a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services, then as the Republican who narrowly lost the race for Louisiana governor in 2003. The questioner, it turned out, was Jindal’s father.
It’s quite an advantage for a newly elected House member, which Jindal now is, to know the president personally. But in his case, the advantage probably isn’t necessary. Given his age (33), his résumé (Brown University, Rhodes Scholar, director of Louisiana colleges, chief of the state’s hospitals), and his grasp of issues (health care, especially), Jindal is destined to be a star in Washington. He was elected to a House seat in Louisiana with 78 percent of the vote on November 2 and picked last week to head the 2004 class of 23 House Republican freshmen.
Jindal has other distinctions. He’s the lone Indian American in Congress. His parents emigrated from India a few days before he was born. They are Hindu, but Jindal converted to Catholicism as a teenager in Baton Rouge. He comes to Washington with plans to transform the health care system in America. And he may know more about the system, from Medicaid to Medicare to private health insurance, than anyone else in Congress. Jindal believes he can be influential on the issue in his first year in the House, even though he won’t be on one of the committees directly dealing with health care. “If you focus on policy,” he says, “you can make a difference from the first day.” We’ll see.
There’s one more thing to know about Jindal: He was the victim of a racist attack by Democrats. In the governor’s race, Jindal was leading Democrat Kathleen Blanco in polls–and the Democrats went all out. At a rally in New Orleans, the president of College Democrats of America, Ashley Bell, said Jindal “is Arab American” and “the Republican token attempt to mend bridges long burnt with the Arab-American community.” Bell also referred to “Bush’s personal ‘Do Boy’ Bobby Jindal.” Blanco was quoted as telling a Democrat eliminated in the primary that “a Hindu out-Catholic’d both of us.”
But it was a TV ad in the final week of the campaign that was pivotal. The spot began with a screaming headline, “Wake Up, Louisiana,” and concluded by asserting, “They hope we won’t wake up until it’s too late.” The ad was reminiscent of efforts to rally white Southerners against supporters of racial integration and civil rights legislation. And it showed a picture of Jindal with disheveled hair, a picture that some Republicans claimed was touched up to make Jindal’s skin look darker. Jindal wound up losing to Blanco in areas where the so-called Bubba vote–white backers of Ku Klux Klansman David Duke in earlier elections–is strong. He lost statewide by 52 to 48 percent.
Jindal never complained publicly about the ad, which criticized his record as hospital chief, or other attacks. Nor did he air a rebuttal. To this day, he’s philosophical about his defeat. “I got a faith that sustains me,” he says. “I desperately wanted to be governor,” but from God’s perspective, “it doesn’t make a difference” who wins a governor’s election. “I’ve got every reason to be grateful. I didn’t feel any regrets. We tried everything we could. When God closes one door, he opens another.”
The door that opened was to Washington. With Democratic senator John Breaux retiring, Republican congressman David Vitter decided to run for the Senate. So Jindal, after spending three weeks at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a few weeks recuperating from the governor’s race, announced for the vacant House seat. The district, which covers suburban New Orleans, is safely Republican. Jindal moved his home from Baton Rouge into the district and won without a runoff.
Jindal believes that “if it hadn’t been for 9/11, health care would be the top domestic issue.” And it’s a problem for Republicans. Instead of providing an attractive alternative to Democratic proposals, Republicans often come up with merely less expensive versions. “That’s a losing strategy,” Jindal says. “We’ll lose inch by inch.” Democrats know exactly what they want to achieve in health care, he says, but Republicans don’t. Jindal, however, says it’s “important to have a philosophical construct for any health care plan.” He does. It’s “a consumer-based, individual-centered, health care system.” In other words, a system far less under the thumb of government and with patients in charge.
One place to start is Medicaid, the federal-state program that pays for health care for low income families. Jindal says Medicaid is politically controlled, inefficient, and not subject to market forces. “We’ve rejected this elsewhere,” says Jindal, “why do we have it here?” Instead, the poor should be “mainstreamed” into private health insurance plans, just as they’ve been steered into jobs by welfare reform. Even if government-run health care were cheaper, Jindal says, “I’d still argue that’s not a good way to deliver health care.”
After health care, Jindal would have Congress move on to tax reform and Social Security reform. Freshman Republicans can play a role in pressing an agenda of conservative reform, he says. “We’re a large class and I believe we can have an impact if we stick together,” he says. “What I care about is policy. I want to be in the room when we write this stuff.” Access to the president may help. When freshman House members went to the White House for lunch in mid-November, the president spotted Jindal and pulled him aside. “Jindal,” Bush said, “I met this guy in Florida. . . .”
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
