MOBILE, Ala. — Probably no governor in the country has had as
good a start to 2012 as Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, who orchestrated
a triumphant romp through his state’s legislature of the most
sweepingly exciting education reforms any state has seen in 30
years. Jindal spoke Thursday in Mobile at a fundraiser for the
Alabama Republican Party, providing a large dose of the infectious
enthusiasm that has made him an unlikely but nearly unstoppable
political power.
With a huge portion of the expected attendees held up in traffic
by a bad wreck on a highway over Mobile Bay, organizers extended
the time for the photo line with Jindal to give more people an
opportunity to arrive. Jindal stood there patiently, thin as a wisp
and smiling broad as Gomer Pyle, greeting person after person with
an easy charm. “Very warm, very engaging,” said local political
veteran Rhodes Prince afterward. “He looks you right in the eye.
Great smile.”
When it came time for the speech, former congressman Jack
Edwards, first elected in the Barry Goldwater southern sweep of
1964, introduced Jindal with the remarkable litany of the
Louisianan’s career path: Rhodes scholar; secretary of his state’s
Department of Health and Hospitals at age 25; president of the
nine-campus, 80,000-student University of Louisiana system at age
28; assistant secretary of the federal Department of Health and
Human Services at 30; congressman at 33; governor at 36; and
re-elected last year in a 10-way race with a stunning 66 percent of
the vote. Along the way, Jindal proved himself a master
crisis-manager, receiving some of the only praise for any elected
official in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and then acting as a
creative-response dynamo in response to the BP oil spill.
A national audience might have trouble fathoming such a resumé
for such a boyish figure who is eminently pleasant but devoid of
any LBJ-like projection of power. After all, many Americans’
biggest exposure to Jindal was his sing-song, widely panned
delivery of the Republican response to Barack Obama’s 2009 State of
the Union address — hardly an impressive calling card, although
the speech’s substance
actually was better than its style.
But that sort of setting did not play to his strengths. Jindal
isn’t a pomp-and-circumstance, behind-a-podium,
read-from-a-teleprompter speaker. In Mobile, in a
fighter-jet-filled pavilion next to the battleship U.S.S. Alabama,
microphone in hand as he stood and sometimes paced casually around
a simple riser, Jindal was more in his element. No notes, no
carefully scripted eloquence; just a torrent of words, full of
facts and sense and a smiling good humor.
He gracefully hit the right notes with a nice mention of
Alabama’s (absent) Republican governor, Robert Bentley. He
skillfully gutted Obama for a litany of broken promises — but, as
a remarkably pleasant assassin, sounded off in sorrow, rather than
with the angry tones or scolding demeanor of, say, a Rick Santorum
on a bad day. He laid out a six-point plan for a national energy
policy, managing to make it sound thorough and simple at the same
time, wonkish enough to impress, but populist and uncomplicated
enough to be readily understandable by any audience. (More permits;
allow fracking; approve the Keystone pipeline; stop
over-regulation; reject cap-and-trade; stop the crony capitalism
represented by Solyndra and instead go to lower, flatter taxes
across the board. Oh — and then, of course, the usual “all of the
above” embrace of fuel sources from nuclear to wind to biodiesel,
but without any special subsidies or advantages.)
He spent only a small time bragging about his own
accomplishments in Louisiana — budget down 26 percent,
unemployment rate below the national average every month of his
governorship, best bond rating for the state in years, elimination
of nearly 10,000 unnecessary full-time government positions — and
then moved into a heartfelt paean to American opportunity and
exceptionalism. He dinged the Occupy movement sweeping the country:
“What they really are talking about is managing the slow decline of
our country. That’s not the America where I grew up!” And, while
still managing to sound anything but nasty,
he again blasted Obama: “the most liberal ideological president
since Jimmy Carter was in the White House. The most incompetent
president since Jimmy Carter was in the White House.”
Jindal didn’t elaborate on the latter point during his speech,
but the first chapter of
his book, Leadership and Crisis, paints a harshly
unflattering portrait of a mean-spirited, self-absorbed, clueless
Obama during the oil-spill crisis. Most Americans have already
forgotten just how inept and counterproductive the Obama
administration was during those months; Jindal laid it all out with
impressive detail.
Somewhat surprisingly, Jindal barely mentioned his recent
triumphs in education policy, but I asked him about them afterward.
The first part of his package involved an astonishing expansion of
school choice throughout Louisiana. Building on the much-vaunted
success of New Orleans schools since virtually the entire local
system went “charter” after Katrina, the new legislation
dramatically increases the pathways to creation of charters
statewide, and streamlines the charter application process. It also
expands Jindal’s earlier, somewhat voucher-like “Scholarships for
Education Excellence Program” that lets students use public dollars
to attend private schools. And it provides a dollar-for-dollar tax
rebate for donations to “school tuition organizations” that provide
scholarships.
“One of our school union leaders had come out and said that many
poor parents don’t have a clue about how to make educational
choices for the children,” Jindal told me. “To me, that is
incredibly offensive, that bureaucratic, top-down, attitude. Who
knows the child’s needs better: the parents, or the elitist,
bureaucratic system? A child’s education should not be determined
by his income or his zip code. We know that there are a lot of kids
trapped in failing schools. We should allow the dollars to follow
the children, not make the children try to follow the dollars.”
The second part of this year’s reforms involved a radical
restructuring (and restricting) of teacher tenure. Tenure now will
be awarded not based on longevity, but instead as a result of five
years of “highly effective” ratings. Likewise, layoffs and
compensation will be decided on merit as well, based on assessments
of the performance of a teacher’s students. Also (and in accordance
with
ideas pushed by national reformer Philip K. Howard), far more
authority and responsibility, without bureaucratic hindrances, will
be afforded superintendents and school principals.
“The idea,” Jindal said, “is this: In the private sector, if you
went to a business owner and said, ‘We’re going to make it almost
impossible to fire your bad employees and reward your good ones,’
that small-business owner wouldn’t be able to stay in business for
long. But understand this: We are indeed also rewarding those
teachers who are doing a great job.”
Indeed, the administration claims that it has increased overall
education spending by more than 9 percent even while cutting the
total state budget by 26 percent, and now has provided generous
merit pay for good results. Reforms in Jindal’s first term included
a Teachers’ Bill of Rights that reduced paperwork burdens and gave
them more disciplinary authority within the classroom.
First-term results — even before this year’s reforms — have
been impressive. Graduation rates are up, dropout rates down,
achievement scores up, test scores up, and Education Week
rated Louisiana second in the nation this year for its standards
and accountability.
“The status quo is just not acceptable,” Jindal said.
All of which helps explain why
Jindal is increasingly mentioned as a potential running mate
for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. And for good
reason.
To be sure, there are some things Jindal could improve. His
handshake should be firmer. Too many of his speech lines are
clichés (e.g. his father talking about walking to school uphill
both ways). Too many conservative activists in Louisiana say the
Jindal administration does a poor job returning phone calls. Listen
hard enough, and a number of other small complaints burble up.
Nonetheless, most of these criticisms amount to small potatoes.
Jindal is a superb debater, deeply knowledgeable about public
policy at both state and federal levels, an excellent crisis
manager, a good-humored advocate, and an expert in health-care
policy (and creative champion of solutions) in a year when, after
the Supreme Court rules on Obamacare, health care could well be the
campaign’s single biggest issue.
The point here, though, is not to promote Jindal for veep. The
point is to assess him as a still-rising star of the conservative
movement. The verdict from everyone to whom I spoke on Thursday
evening was that his speech was boffo — at worst a solid B,
perhaps as good as an A-minus, borderline straight-A. His personal
friendliness is almost off the top end of the charts. And his
policy successes in 17 years of appointive and elective public life
are far more than merely considerable.
Best of all is that his wonkishness does not translate into a
desire for wonks to solve all our problems. “What makes America so
great,” he said in his speech, “is not another government
program.”
Bobby Jindal is all about individual freedom and opportunity.
His life story shows the magic of both.
