Via Cubachi, two minutes of pure candy. Maybe my expectations were too low because I’d never seen him address a crowd before and still remember his, er, unfortunate performance following Obama’s SOTU speech a few years ago, but I’m stunned by how effective he is here even in a clip this brief. With the exception of Christie, no Republican governor’s done more over the last three months to impress the righty base, I think, than this guy has.
Sometimes it takes a crisis to show what a leader can do. If you rise to the occasion, you look like Bobby Jindahl, if you don’t, you look like Barack Obama.
As Vince Lombardi said, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Bobby Jindal has shown that he will take charge and do whatever has to be done, when things are going horribly.
Bobby Jindal has been too busy protecting his state to read opinion polls, but the people of Louisiana are behind him–despite everything Louisiana has endured during this oil spill, the latest Rasmussen poll shows Jindal with 74% job approval.
Bobby Jindal IS everything Obama wants to be. Yes he can.
In 1993 U.S. Representative Jim McCrery (whom Jindal had worked for as a summer intern) introduced him to Governor Mike Foster. In 1996 Foster appointed Jindal as Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, an agency that represented about 40 percent of the state budget and employed over 12,000 people. Jindal was the youngest ever Secretary of the DHH at 25. During his tenure, Louisiana's Medicaid program went from bankruptcy with a $400 million deficit into three years of surpluses totaling $220 million. Under Jindal's term, Louisiana nationally rose to third place in child healthcare screenings, with child immunizations rising, and introduced new and expanded services for the elderly and the disabled. 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, at only 28 years of age, Jindal was appointed to become the youngest-ever president of the University of Louisiana System, the nation's 16th largest system of higher education with over 80,000 students per year. 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.
Compare that with president Tarball's resume.
And that was before he was ever elected Governor.
He had 2 bachelor degrees by the age of 20.
And the equivalent of a PhD from Oxford shortly thereafter.
