Jindal Response Was ‘Tone-deaf’ & Outdated
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The official Republican party response from Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal was surprising for a number of reasons, not least because he declared his party’s support for affordable universal healthcare coverage, something with very little history to back it up. He clearly sought to co-opt Obama’a can-do “era of responsibility” message. He even went as far as to suggest that somehow his vision might be more in line with the spirit of great historic achievements like the freeing of slaves than Obama’s, perhaps an ethical low in purely rhetorical flourishes.
But Jindal’s speech was severely tone-deaf and outdated for a very important reason: he seemed totally unaware of the level of pervasive mistrust now felt by the American electorate for the bizarre Republican obsession with seeking government office in order to undermine the effectiveness of government.
For a leading politician to say he opposes the government’s role in helping make America a more prosperous place is akin to confessing he has learned absolutely nothing from either Hurricane Katrina or the election of Barack Obama. There was real arrogance in Jindal’s citing Katrina as an example of why government cannot be trusted, precisely because it was the party he represents that was wholly responsible for the catastrophic federal response, and that event was in part the impetus that pushed the nation toward the Democratic party.
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Barack Obama was elected in large part because he is seen as the antidote to the rampant incompetence that resulted from the anti-government approach of Republicans who spoke very much like Bobby Jindal did tonight.
Jindal is in a highly undesirable situation, considering that nearly all of the positive inroads he might try to make to the center, or even the center-right, of the American political spectrum, is already being far more expertly spoken and implemented by the Democratic president himself. He might be a more moderate Republican figure on a number of issues, but is now facing the problem of having to “find a voice” on the fringe of the far-right, where his party owns the game.
He is facing pressure from the national party, which still operates under the worrying misconception that the nation’s rapid and overwhelming shift to the left was somehow the result of his party being neither ideological nor rightist enough. In fact, it was the misguided, poorly imagined and irresponsible ideology of his party that lost them their brief grip on the American system of government, and it is likely that this persistent irrelevance to the current crisis means the Republican party will continue to wander in the wilderness, surrendering the broad center to the Democrats possibly for a generation, as happened in the 1930s.
Bobby Jindal even went to the extreme of trying to cloak himself in Obama’s issues, while providing absolutely zero specifics, then appearing to accuse Obama of somehow not holding the very views being stolen. He talked about “transparency”, even an unprecedented level of it, while not acknowledging that the most important push for transparency in the history of incoming administrations has just taken place and that his party has done nothing in recent years to promote that ideal.
Jindal needs to take stock, to understand why his message was so flat, so off-balance, so inept in response to a sweeping policy-specific address with actual can-do proposals, such as Obama’s. He may find that the flaw in his speech is his party’s ideology, and the assumption that all things can be fixed by stripping funding for potentially productive government activity. He may find his party needs a true division in leadership, and a true competition for the future, and he will have to choose sides if a credible platform for national government will be crafted.
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