Americans on Tuesday night had the chance to see in Governor
Bobby Jindal what Louisianans have marveled at for 13 years now,
ever since he became at 24 the director of the state health
department: a bright, sincere, earnest, capable, conservative
reformer with no apparent sharp edges. It’s almost impossible not
to like him — but the question is whether he’s fully ready to
lead.
Everybody knows that giving the minority party’s “response” to a
major presidential address is a tough, tough task. There’s no
pomp, no audience, and no presidential aura. The worst of those
is the lack of audience: Unless you are Ronald Reagan, it is
infinitely harder to make connection with a TV lens than it is to
let the TV lens show you making a connection to a live audience
who give visual feedback to the speaker.
Jindal, then, can hardly be blamed for not having yet mastered
the task. Especially early in his address, his delivery was
painfully sing-songish, like that of a high school senior running
for class president. He needs to learn to break up the meter of
his delivery, like real people talk in conversations. He also
took too long talking about himself rather than about the needs
of the people of this nation. And his theme-setting story about
how it was the stocked shelves of a grocery store that moved his
father to say that “Americans can do anything”… well, it was
hokey, in a way that the Orwellian but masterly Barack Obama
almost never appears.
But what Jindal lacked in “presence,” he made up for with
transparent believability. His very boyishness eliminates any
sense that his hokeyness contains any cynicism — and his
principles of self-reliance rather than reliance on big
government are principles that still resonate with the American
soul. He was especially good when he (in slightly over-broad
strokes) made simple descriptions of what is entailed by liberal
Obama approaches: What the stimulus will do, he said, is “grow
the government, increase our taxes down the line, and saddle our
children with debt.” Conversely, he aptly described conservative
approaches. On health care, he advertised this “simple principle.
We stand for universal access. What we oppose is universal
government health care.”
Obama gave us sweeping vision, breathtaking in its scope (and in
its socialistic abandonment of all sorts of basic American tenets
of limited government), combined with well-disguised Orwellian
tricks of language that falsely rooted his vision in age-old
American values. In response, Jindal tried to give us a return to
common sense:
“Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could
spend money we do not have, on things we do not need? That is
precisely what the Democrats in Congress just did. It’s
irresponsible. And it’s no way to strengthen our economy, create
jobs, or build a prosperous future for our children.…”
Nobody who watched will say that Jindal isn’t a man with a
future. But few who watched would say that his national future is
now.
Louisianans already are finding that Jindal is a good governor,
but less than a fully realized one. His vaunted ethics reforms
were good, but contained some deleterious loopholes. He claimed
to have cut the number of state employees, but the total actually
has grown (slightly) so far, with high-salaried employees seeing
an especially notable increase.
He claimed to cut taxes, but the truth is that he ran to get
ahead of a parade that already started without him.
It’s not that Jindal has been a spendthrift liberal or
deliberately misleading. But being governor requires that one
establish mastery over a state legislature that often refuses to
be mastered, and it involves real-world political management
skills that take time to develop. (And political
management skills are of a different order than mere bureaucratic
skills, which Jindal already has proved in past jobs in
abundance.)
On all of these fronts, Jindal is decently talented — far, far
from inept — but still less than significantly experienced. His
utterly superb on-the-fly management of two major hurricane
responses — one as a congressman who clearly outperformed the
mayor and then-governor, the other one as governor himself —
shows a quick mind, a strong will, a can-do spirit, a good heart,
and a gut-level competence. But sometimes, counterintuitively, it
is the hard, day-to-day management of inside politics that is
more difficult to excel at than is crisis management where people
respond by necessity to the decisive orders of somebody willing
to take control and responsibility.
All of which is to say that Jindal is still a work in progress. A
very good work, but still in progress nonetheless. And so he
proved in his mini-speech tonight, in which he clearly did not
live up to his “superstar” billing, but where he nevertheless
provided some necessary correctives to Obama’s largesse, along
with some hope for the future.
(Mr. Hillyer, a Louisiana native, has followed Bobby Jindal’s
career since 1991.)
