Bobby Jindal

Bobby Jindal

Piyush "Bobby" Jindal (born June 10, 1971) is the current Governor of the U.S. state of Louisiana. Prior to his election as governor, he was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Louisiana's 1st congressional district, to which he was elected in 2004 to succeed current U.S. Senator David Vitter. Jindal was re-elected to Congress in the 2006 election with 88 percent of the vote.

On October 20, 2007, Jindal was elected governor of Louisiana, winning a four-way race with 54% of the vote. At age 36, Jindal became the youngest current governor in the United States. He also became the first non-white to serve as governor of Louisiana since P. B. S. Pinchback during Reconstruction; one of fewer than ten people not of primarily European ethnicity elected governor of a state following Reconstruction, and the first Indian American elected to state-wide office in U.S. history. Jindal has been mentioned as a potential candidate in the 2012 United States presidential election.

Piyush Jindal (pronounced /ˈdʒɪndəl/) was born on June 10, 1971 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Punjabi Indian immigrants Amar and Raj Jindal, who had recently arrived for Amar to attend graduate school at Louisiana State University. His father, Amar, left India and his ancestral family village of Khanpura in 1970,. His mother, Raj, is an information technology director for the Louisiana Department of Labor. According to family lore, Jindal chose to re-name himself "Bobby" inspired by the sitcom character Bobby Brady after watching The Brady Bunch television series at the age of four. He has been known by his self-adopted nickname ever since—as a civil servant, politician, student, and writer—though legally his name remains Piyush Jindal.

Jindal was born and raised a Hindu, but converted to Catholicism in high school. Jindal's Catholic faith includes a solidarity with other Christian denominations; he has given speeches and offered religious testimony before Baptist and Pentecostal congregations. He attended public school at Baton Rouge Magnet High School. Following high school, Jindal attended Brown University, graduating with honors in biology and public policy. Although he had thought of a career in medicine or law and was accepted by Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School, he chose to pursue a political career. He received a master's degree in political science from New College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar.

After Oxford, he joined McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm, where he advised Fortune 500 companies.

In 1996 Jindal married Supriya Jolly (born 1972). The couple has three children: Selia Elizabeth, Shaan Robert, and Slade Ryan.

In 1993 Republican U.S. Representative Jim McCrery (for whom Jindal had once worked as a summer intern) introduced Jindal to Republican Governor Mike Foster. In 1996 Foster appointed Jindal to be secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, an agency which then represented about 40 percent of the state budget. During his tenure as secretary, Louisiana's Medicaid program went from bankruptcy with a $400 million deficit into three years of surpluses totaling $220 million. Jindal was criticized during the 2007 campaign by the Louisiana AFL-CIO for having closed some local clinics to balance the budget. In 1998, Jindal was appointed executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, a 17-member panel charged with devising plans to reform Medicare.

In 1999, at the request of the Louisiana Governor's Office and the Louisiana State Legislature, Jindal volunteered his time to study how Louisiana might use its $4.4 billion share of the tobacco settlement. In that same year Jindal was appointed to become the youngest-ever president of the University of Louisiana System. In March 2001 he was nominated by President George W. Bush to be Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Planning and Evaluation. He was later unanimously confirmed by a vote of the United States Senate and began serving on July 9, 2001. In that position, he served as the principal policy advisor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. He resigned from that post on February 21, 2003, to return to Louisiana and run for governor.

Jindal came to national prominence during the 2003 election for Louisiana governor.

In what Louisianans call an "open primary" (but which is technically a nonpartisan blanket primary), Jindal finished first with 33 percent of the vote. He received endorsements from the largest paper in Louisiana, the New Orleans' Times-Picayune; the newly-re-elected Democratic mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin; and the outgoing Republican governor, Mike Foster. In the second balloting, Jindal faced the outgoing lieutenant governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Lafayette, a Democrat. Despite winning in Blanco's hometown, he lost many normally conservative parishes in north Louisiana, and Blanco prevailed with 52 percent of the popular vote.

Political analysts have speculated on myriad explanations for his loss. Some have blamed Jindal for his refusal to answer questions about his record brought up in several advertisements, which the Jindal Campaign called "negative attack ads"; others note that a significant number of conservative Louisianans remain more comfortable voting for a Democrat, especially a conservative one, than for a Republican. Despite his losing the election in 2003, the run for governor made Jindal a well-known figure on the state's political scene.

A few weeks after the 2003 gubernatorial runoff, Jindal decided to run for Louisiana's 1st congressional district. The incumbent, David Vitter, was running for the Senate seat being vacated by John Breaux. The Louisiana Republican Party endorsed him in the primary despite the fact that Mike Rogers, also a Republican, was running for the same seat. The 1st District has been in Republican hands since a 1977 special election and is widely considered to be the most conservative district in Louisiana. Jindal also had an advantage because his campaign was able to raise over $1 million very early in the campaign, making it harder for other candidates to effectively raise funds to oppose him. He won the 2004 Election with 78 percent of the vote.

He was appointed to the House Committee on Homeland Security, the House Committee on Resources, and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. He was made vice-chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attacks.

On May 3, 2008 a special election was held to determine Jindal's replacement. Steve Scalise, a state legislator, was elected with 75 percent of the vote over University of New Orleans professor Dr. Gilda Reed.

On January 22, 2007, Jindal announced his candidacy for governor. Polling data showed him with an early lead in the race, and he remained the favorite throughout the campaign. He defeated eleven opponents in the nonpartisan blanket primary held on October 20, including two prominent Democrats, State Senator Walter Boasso of Chalmette and Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell of Bossier City, and an independent, New Orleans businessman John Georges.

Jindal finished with 699,672 votes (54 percent). Boasso ran second with 226,364 votes (17 percent). Georges finished with 186,800 (14 percent), and Campbell, who is also a former state senator, ran fourth with 161,425 (12 percent). The remaining candidates collectively polled three percent of the vote. Jindal polled pluralities or majorities in 60 of the state's 64 parishes (equivalent to counties in other states). He lost narrowly to Georges in Orleans Parish, to Boasso in St. Bernard Parish (which Boasso represented in the Legislature), and in the two neighboring north Louisiana parishes of Red River and Bienville located south of Shreveport, both of which are historically Democratic and supported Campbell. In the 2003 contest with Blanco, Jindal had lost most of the northern parishes.

Jindal assumed the position of governor when he took the oath of office on January 14, 2008. At thirty-six, he became the youngest sitting governor in the United States. He is also Louisiana's first non-white governor since P. B. S. Pinchback served for thirty-five days during Reconstruction, and the first non-white governor to be elected (Pinchback succeeded to the position of Lieutenant Governor on the death of Oscar Dunn, then to Governor upon the impeachment of Henry Clay Warmoth)..

On June 27, 2008, Louisiana's Secretary of State confirmed that a recall petition had been filed against Governor Jindal. Ryan and Kourtney Fournier filed the petition in response to Jindal's refusal to veto a bill that would more than double the current state legislative pay. The petitioners had 180 days to collect the signatures of over 900,000 registered voters to force a recall election on the ballot. If accomplished, a simple majority would have been needed to remove the Governor. During his campaign for Governor, Jindal had pledged to prevent legislative pay raises that would take effect during the current term. Jindal responded by saying that he is opposed to the pay increase but that he had pledged to let the legislature govern themselves.

On June 30, 2008, Governor Jindal reversed his earlier position by vetoing the pay raise legislation, stating that he made a mistake by staying out of the pay raise issue. In response, the petitioners dropped their recall effort.

Louisiana state government watchdog C.B. Forgotston, former counsel to the House Appropriations Committee who supported Jindal's election in 2007, has expressed disappointment with the governor in regard to the legislative pay raise and other fiscal issues too. Forgotston, a Hammond lawyer, said he would grade Jindal an A in self-promotion and a D in performance in office.

On February 8, 2008, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh mentioned on his syndicated show that Jindal could be a possible choice for the Republican vice presidential nomination in 2008. He said that Jindal might be perceived as an asset to McCain's campaign because he has support in the conservative base of the Republican Party and his youth offsets Sen. McCain's age. If McCain had won the presidency, he would have been the oldest president ever inaugurated to a first term. Heightening the speculation, McCain invited Jindal, Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and McCain's former rivals Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee to meet at McCain's home in Arizona on Friday, May 23, 2008, according to a Republican familiar with the decision; Romney, Huckabee, and Pawlenty, all of whom were already well acquainted with McCain, declined because of prior commitments. The meeting may have served a different purpose, such as consideration of Jindal for the opportunity to speak at the 2008 Republican National Convention, in a similar fashion to Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, cementing a place for him in the party and opening the gate for a future run for the presidency. Speculation was fueled by simultaneous July 21, 2008, reports that Sen. McCain was making a sudden visit to Louisiana to again meet with Gov. Jindal and that Sen. McCain was readying to name his running mate within a week. However, on July 23, 2008, Jindal said he would not be the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008. Jindal added that he "never talked to the senator about the vice presidency or his thoughts on selecting the vice president." Ultimately, on Friday, August 29, 2008, McCain chose Alaska's governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. While Jindal was invited to speak at the party convention, he was not offered the prominence of delivering a keynote speech.

Jindal oversaw one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history in late August 2008 prior to the Louisiana landfall of Hurricane Gustav. He issued mandatory evacuation orders for the state’s coastal areas and activated 3,000 National Guardsman to aid in the exodus. Government officials vacated hospitals and nursing homes and put the poor, the ill, and the elderly on buses and trains out of town. The evacuation was credited as one reason that Gustav only resulted in 16 deaths in the U.S. Jindal had been scheduled to address the Republican National Convention, but cancelled his plans to focus on Louisiana’s needs during the storm.

Jindal has been mentioned as a potential candidate for the 2012 presidential election. On December 10, 2008, Jindal indicated that he would not run for president in 2012, saying he will focus on his reelection in 2011 and that this would make transitioning to a national campaign difficult, though he later attempted to leave himself the opportunity to change his mind in the future. Speculation was increased as Jindal was chosen by the Republican Party to give its official response to Democratic President Barack Obama's 2009 Speech to the Joint Session of the United States Congress.

On February 24, 2009 Jindal delivered the official Republican response to President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress. Jindal called the president's economic stimulus plan “irresponsible” and argued against government intervention. He used Hurricane Katrina to warn against government solutions to the economic crisis. "Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us," Jindal said. "Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina, we have our doubts." He praised the late sheriff Harry Lee for standing up to the government during Katrina. He complained that the nearly $800 billion stimulus bill included "$140 million for something called volcano monitoring." "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington," Jindal said. Reactions to Jindal's speech and delivery were mostly negative, including from among Republicans. Conservative commentators were among the harshest critics, calling his speech "amateurish", "childish", "stale", "insane", "a flop", and "a disaster for the Republican Party". Jindal's voice and earnest delivery drew comparisons to Kenneth the Page on the NBC comedy "30 Rock".

Jindal has a 100% pro-life voting record according to the National Right to Life Committee. He does not condemn medical procedures meant to save the life of a pregnant woman that would indirectly cause the termination of the pregnancy. In 2003 Jindal was reported to have stated that he did not object to the use of emergency contraception in the case of rape if the victim requests it. He opposes embryonic stem cell research and voted against increasing federal funding to expand embryonic stem cell lines.

Jindal opposes the legalization of same-sex marriage, and has voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment to restrict marriage to a union between one man and one woman. In December 2008, Jindal announced the formation of the Louisiana Commission on Marriage and Family, including individuals representing organizations that oppose same-sex marriage, including Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, Gene Mills, the executive director of the Louisiana Family Forum and Mike Johnson, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund.

As a private citizen, Jindal voted for the "Stelly Tax plan", a referendum named for former state Representative Vic Stelly of Lake Charles, which swapped some sales taxes for higher income taxes. Whether or not the "Stelly Plan" is giving the desired results is still hotly debated statewide. Early Republican challenger Steve Scalise challenged Jindal on his vote for this tax plan before Scalise dropped out of the congressional race in 2004. As Governor, Jindal initially opposed reforms to the Stelly plan that would result in over $300 million in tax cuts. He later agreed to the tax cut after the legislature appeared headed to eliminating the entire personal income tax which Jindal also opposed. Talk show host Moon Griffon subsequently refused to air radio ads paid for by the organization Believe in Louisiana crediting Jindal for Stelly reforms saying "Now, they are taking credit for the biggest income tax cut in the history of Louisiana and I felt like it was a lie. To be real blunt, very misleading and it was an outright lie because he had fought hard against it".

Jindal voted yes on making the PATRIOT Act permanent, voted in favor of the 2006 Military Commissions Act, supported a constitutional amendment banning flag burning, and voted for the Real ID Act of 2005. Jindal has an "A" rating from Gun Owners of America.

Jindal also supports co-payments in Medicaid.

In 2006, Jindal sponsored the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act (H.R. 4761), a bill to eliminate the moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling over the U.S. outer continental shelf, which prompted the watchdog group Republicans for Environmental Protection to issue him "an environmental harm demerit". Jindal's 2006 rating from that organization was -4, among the lowest in Congress. The nonpartisan League of Conservation Voters also censured Jindal for securing passage of H.R. 4761 in the House of Representatives; the group rated his environmental performance that year at seven percent, citing anti-environment votes on 11 out of 12 critical issues. Jindal's lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters is seven percent. Despite claims that Jindal's bill was successful, H.R. 4761 was replaced by S 3711 (known as the Domenici-Landrieu Fair Share Plan). The original Senate version was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by President Bush.

In 2007, Jindal led the Louisiana delegation in Congressional earmark funding. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, in 2007, Jindal's earmark funding was 14th among all Congressmen. As Governor in 2008, Jindal used his line item veto to strike $16 million in earmarks from the state budget while allowing $30 million in legislator added spending.

Jindal supports the teaching of "intelligent design" in public schools. Despite calls for a veto from groups as diverse as the the Roman Catholic Church, the ACLU, the National Review, and Jindal's own biology professors at Brown University, Jindal signed the Louisiana Academic Freedom Act in 2008.

On June 25, 2008, Jindal signed the "Sex Offender Chemical Castration Bill", authorizing the chemical castration of those convicted of certain sex offenses.

Jindal has also voted against giving the federal government jurisdiction to help local law enforcement with hate violence based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender and disability.

A list of Jindal's published writings up to 2001 can be found in the hearing report for his 2001 U.S. Senate confirmation. They include newspaper columns, law review articles, and an article co-authored for the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Jindal's pre-2001 writings include several articles in the New Oxford Review, one of which dealt with the subject of exorcism. In that 1994 article, Jindal described witnessing a friend seemingly being possessed by a demon. However, at the end of the article he questioned whether he actually witnessed spiritual warfare.

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Louisiana's 1st congressional district special election, 2008

Voters in Louisiana's 1st congressional district voting in a special election on 2008-05-03 elected Steve Scalise as a new member of the United States House of Representatives, replacing Representative Bobby Jindal who resigned on 2008-01-14 to become Governor of Louisiana.

This election and Louisiana's 6th congressional district special election were the first Louisiana congressional elections not based on Louisiana's jungle primary since the 1970s.

State Sen. Steve Scalise won the May 3rd special general election decisively and was sworn in on May 7.

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Louisiana gubernatorial election, 2007

The Louisiana gubernatorial election of 2007 was held on October 20. The filing deadline for candidates was September 6. On the day of the election, all 12 candidates competed in an open jungle primary. With all precincts reporting, Bobby Jindal won the election with 54%.

Elections in Louisiana, with the exception of U.S. presidential elections (and congressional races beginning in 2008), follow a variation of the open primary system called the jungle primary. Candidates of any and all parties are listed on one ballot; voters need not limit themselves to the candidates of one party. Unless one candidate takes more than 50% of the vote in the first round, a run-off election is then held between the top two candidates, who may in fact be members of the same party. This scenario occurred in the 7th District congressional race in 1996, when Democrats Chris John and Hunter Lundy made the runoff for the open seat, and in 1999, when Republicans Suzanne Haik Terrell and Woody Jenkins made the runoff for Commissioner of Elections.

Originally planning to run for re-election, the incumbent governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, entered the election year with a significant erosion in her level of popular support, due in large part to perceptions of inadequate performance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In November 2006, Blanco had an approval rating of 39%, and she had encountered further political setbacks since November.

In December 2006, Blanco called a special session of the Louisiana State Legislature which she intended to use to dispense $2.1 billion worth of tax cuts, teacher raises, road projects and other spending programs. Legislators allied with Blanco attempted to lift a spending cap imposed by the state constitution, but Republican lawmakers defeated Blanco’s spending measures. The high-profile defeat further eroded Blanco’s political reputation.

By late 2006 and early 2007, Blanco was facing increasingly heated accusations of delays and incompetence in administering the Road Home Program, a state-run program which Blanco had set up following Katrina in order to distribute federal aid money to Katrina victims for damage to their homes. By January 2007, fewer than 250 of an estimated 100,000 applicants had received payments from the program, and many of the payments were apparently based on assessments which grossly undervalued the cost of damage to homes.

By January 2007, the first opinion polls of the campaign showed Blanco trailing expected opponent Bobby Jindal by over 20 percentage points. Facing an upcoming re-election campaign with greatly reduced popularity, Blanco began her campaign by making repeated public criticisms of the administration of President George W. Bush in January 2007. Noting that Bush neglected to mention Gulf Coast reconstruction in his 2007 State of the Union Address, Blanco called for a bipartisan Congressional investigation into the conduct of the Bush administration following Katrina, to determine whether partisan politics played a role in the slow response to the storm. This call followed comments by disgraced former FEMA director Michael D. Brown, who claimed that the White House had planned to upstage Blanco by federalizing the National Guard in the days following the storm. Blanco also repeated accusations that Mississippi received preferential treatment because its governor, Haley Barbour, is a Republican.

Beginning in February 2007, speculation grew among Louisiana political commentators that former U.S. Senator and current Washington, D.C. lobbyist John Breaux would announce his candidacy. However, controversy emerged as to whether Breaux would meet the residency requirements to run for Governor as he had listed his primary address in Maryland since 2005 and was registered to vote there.

On March 20, 2007, Blanco announced that she would not be running for re-election. She stated that removing herself from the campaign would allow her to focus the remainder of her term on Louisiana’s recovery without the distraction of campaigning for re-election. But her announcement came after weeks of growing calls from members of the Louisiana Democratic party for her to step aside and allow a more popular candidate to face Jindal.

On March 29, John Breaux made his first Louisiana public appearance since speculation began concerning his potential candidacy. Breaux said that he intended to run, and would announce his candidacy as soon as Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti, a Democrat, gave a formal legal opinion on whether Breaux was eligible to run. At issue was the clause in the Louisiana constitution which states that a candidate for governor must be a 'citizen' of the State of Louisiana; what constitutes a citizen is not defined. The state Republican party began running advertisements attacking Breaux as a resident of Maryland.

On April 13, Breaux released a statement that he would not be running for governor. Attorney General Foti had declined to issue an opinion on Breaux's eligibility, stating it was an issue for the courts to decide. Breaux stated that he did not want the issue of eligibility to overshadow his campaign, as a court challenge would not occur until September.

On April 17, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu also declined to run leaving the field very open on the Democratic side. Due to the lack of a high-profile Democratic candidate, party leaders approached Republican State Senator Walter Boasso about switching parties; Boasso formally switched to the Democratic Party on April 26.

As of the April 2007 reports, two Republican candidates have emerged with the largest campaign warchests in Louisiana history - Georges with $5.5 million cash on hand and Jindal who has received $5 million in campaign financing. The financial strength of the two Republicans presented a tremendous challenge to recruiting a strong candidate for the Democratic party. Georges, however, has since left the Louisiana GOP and registered as an independent for the gubernatorial race.

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Louisiana gubernatorial election, 2003

The Louisiana gubernatorial election of 2003 resulted in the election of Kathleen Babineaux Blanco as governor of Louisiana.

Elections in Louisiana—with the exception of U.S. presidential elections—follow a variation of the open primary system called the jungle primary. Candidates of any and all parties are listed on one ballot; voters need not limit themselves to the candidates of one party. Unless one candidate takes more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, a run-off election is then held between the top two candidates, who may in fact be members of the same party. In this election, the first round of voting was held on October 4, 2003, and the runoff was held on November 15, 2003.

Departing Governor Foster was disqualified from succeeding himself for a third term by Louisiana's constitution, so the 2003 race was perceived as wide open and saw a large number of candidates enter the campaign. The primary phase of the campaign was characterized by the large number of strong Democratic contenders. Ieyoub was seen as one of the strongest Democratic candidates throughout the campaign, and only narrowly lost a slot in the runoff to Blanco, who had a strong base of support in the Acadian parishes and among women voters. The efforts of Leach to appeal to the same base as Ieyoub led them to split the Democratic vote and to come in third and fourth.

The leading Republican candidate, by contrast, was chosen fairly early on. Jindal took a commanding lead among Republican supporters early in the campaign, leaving Hunt Downer far behind.

In the runoff, Jindal received endorsements from the New Orleans Times-Picayune (the largest paper in Louisiana), Mayor Nagin (who had supported Ewing in the primary but declined to endorse Blanco in the runoff), and outgoing Republican Governor Mike Foster. Some political analysts believe that his narrow loss was partly due to racism. Other political analysts have blamed Jindal for his refusal to answer questions about his record brought up in several ads, which the Jindal campaign called "negative attack ads". Still others note that a significant number of conservative Louisianans remain more comfortable voting for a conservative Democrat than for a Republican. The runoff between Bobby Jindal and Kathleen Blanco brought two 'firsts' for Louisiana political history. If elected, Jindal would have been the United States' first Indian-American governor. The victorious Blanco became Louisiana's first woman governor. She was also the second woman to have been lieutenant governor.

Parent, Wayne. Inside the Carnival: Unmasking Louisiana Politics. LSU Press, 2004.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune. "Jindal takes easy lead heading into runoff." October 5, 2003.

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