Bobby Jindal was supposed to be ‘the next Ronald Reagan.’ Here’s what went wrong.
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/bobby-jindal-was-supposed-to-be-the-next-ronald-122285669721.html
What happened? Why hasn’t Jindal become the next Reagan — or, as my profile posited, “the GOP’s Obama”? On the eve of the governor’s big announcement, I revisited my 2008 reporting in an attempt to recall what initially made him such an exciting political prospect. (Portions of this piece are adapted from that profile.) I also reviewed his record over the subsequent six-plus years....
When national pundits talk about Jindal, to the degree they deign to discuss him at all, they tend to attribute his downfall to a single event: his amateurish response to Obama’s 2009 State of the Union address. The speech, as Vox wrote this week, “was supposed to be (Jindal’s) big political ‘coming out’; instead the governor wound up becoming “the object of bipartisan ridicule” thanks to his Kenneth-the-Page-like delivery....
The problem for Jindal, says Pearson Cross, a University of Louisiana political science professor who is currently working on a book about the governor, isn’t how the national electorate perceives him. It’s how his political ambitions have distorted his policy priorities, and how those policies, in turn, have affected his home state.
“Jindal’s fiscal policy has created some real hard times here,” Cross explains. “The feeling is that he has governed to please people outside Louisiana — that we’ve become an afterthought.”
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