June 24^th

The list of official Republican candidates for the Presidency has now reached a baker’s dozen. The newest volunteer is Piyush (Bobby) Jindal, currently Governor of Louisiana. Governor Jindal’s parents were born in India and came here, quite legitimately, on student visas. No matter, I’m sure Donald Trump will ask for a birth certificate and a copy of Jindal’s grades at Brown University and at Oxford University which he attended on a Rhodes scholarship.

Mr. Jindal had reached early political fame by being elected to the US House of Representatives when he was just thirty-three years old. Subsequently he was elected governor of Louisiana in a landslide. His popularity has since slipped substantially. In May his approval rating in his home state was just 32.8% and that’s lower than the President’s approval rating in this very red state.

This drop may have begun with his obvious unease when delivering the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union message in 2009. John Stewart spent some time making fun of Jindal’s response on his comedy show. When you inadvertently provide material for late night comics in your major speeches you have a problem. Unfortunately Jindal pointed out the abysmal failure of the federal government to come to the aid of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. He might not have remembered that the federal government at the time was presided over by a Republican President, who incidentally satisfied himself by simply flying over that devastation, perhaps expecting the sight of Air Force one to cheer up the folks on the ground.

Jindal converted to Catholicism some time ago; he now describes himself as an “Evangelical Catholic.” While this term has a very specific meaning within the Catholic Church many see Jindal’s use of the term as an obvious attempt to appeal to just everybody. He has also run into other embarrassment recently; on a trip to England he declared that there were sections of some English cities so under Sharia law that police hesitated to visit them and that women not clad in Burkas were assaulted on the streets. This was disputed vigorously by his English hosts who insisted that he identify these regions and that they would go there with him to prove him wrong. Naturally he weaseled out of that commitment.

Jindal hardly registers on the various national polls and as a result he probably won’t get on the debate stage. This, and the fact that he has no national name recognition, puts him at a great disadvantage in the money raising game. At this point Jeb Bush is first and Donald Trump is just behind him in the national polls. Most politicos believe this curious situation is entirely due to name recognition but who knows; maybe the ticket will be Donald Trump and Ann Coulter after all.