Maybe Bobby Jindal is a new kind of Republican after all.
Republicans had high hopes for the Louisiana Governor, whose brains, youth and conspicuous ethnicity (his family is from India) marked him as conservatives’ answer to Barack Obama. That’s why they chose Jindal to gave his party’s response to Obama’s first address to Congress last January.
But the nationally televised speech bombed. Jindal served up GOP boilerplate rather than fresh ideas, and his delivery was off-kilter to boot. So much, it seemed, for the GOP’s Great Not-So-White Hope.
But botched speeches aren’t always fatal. Just ask Bill Clinton, whose long-winded keynote address to the 1988 Democratic National Convention was also seen as aborting a promising political career.
And Jindal, a serious wonk who ran Louisiana’s Medicare program while still in his 20s, did something rare for a Republican these days: he started making sense. Specifically, he urged Congressional Republicans to drop their purely obstructionist stance and work with the White House to pass a bipartisan health reform.
“I think now is the perfect time to pivot and say, not only here’s what we’re against, and not only here’s how we’re going to contrast ourselves, but here’s what we’re for,” Jindal told Politico. He also asserted that Republicans offer nothing positive on health reform “to our peril and the nation’s peril.”
That’s an important point. Many Republicans seem to think that carpetbombing “Obamacare” without offering a coherent alternative is politically cost-free. After all, polls show falling support for Obama’s plan to revamp health care, especially among seniors and independents.
Some progressives apparently agree that Republicans can lie outrageously and get away with it. Especially among elites, the plummeting poll numbers confirm an unflattering view of Americans as a bovine mass easily stampeded by right-wing buzzphrases – “socialism,” “death panels,” “the death tax” and the like.
Well, there’s also evidence that many Americans are watching the GOP’s antics, and don’t like what they see. By wide margins, (52-27 in this NYT-CBS poll) the public still thinks Obama has better ideas on health care than Congressional Republicans. According to Democracy Corps, a solid majority believes Republicans “are more interested in partisan politics than solving the country’s problems.”
The GOP’s nattering negativism, in other words, may be undermining public confidence in Obama’s ability to revamp the health care system, but it’s also reinforcing the party’s well-earned reputation as being unfit to govern.
So maybe Jindal is on to something. And progressives ought to have at least as much faith as he seems to in the public’s ability to distinguish serious arguments about health reform from right-wing agitprop and paranoia.
