Dear Bobby Jindal: Please run for President

I don’t put much stock into predictions that one party will remain dominant for a generation, but if Bobby Jindal is the best the Republicans have, then they’re going to be out of power for a very long time. Jindal followed Barack Obama’s message about not giving up, making tough choices, and investing in our future with about 5 minutes of poorly-delivered, uninspiring boilerplate.

It’s clear that the Republicans are completely out of ideas. Jindal had nothing to say that we haven’t heard from his party for the last 4 years. In fact, we’ve rejected everything he said at the polls. Twice. In massive numbers. Americans finally see past Jindal’s Grover Norquist-inspired rhetoric. He pointed to Republican failures, such as Hurricane Katrina, as proof that government is the problem. But he’s got that partially wrong. It’s just Republican government — incompetent and full of misplaced priorities — that’s the problem.

Obama, on the other hand gave a vision for how the government could help to solve the problem. He treated us like adults, not giving us platitudes but engaging us in a detailed explanation of how he thought we could turn things around.

In the next few days, I will submit a budget to Congress. So often, we have come to view these documents as simply numbers on a page or laundry lists of programs. I see this document differently. I see it as a vision for America – as a blueprint for our future.

…

My job – our job – is to solve the problem. Our job is to govern with a sense of responsibility. I will not spend a single penny for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can’t pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can’t get a mortgage…. That’s what this is about. It’s not about helping banks – it’s about helping people.

David Brooks summed things up nicely:

JIM LEHRER: Now that, of course, was Gov. Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, making the Republican response. David, how well do you think he did?

DAVID BROOKS: Uh, not so well. You know, I think Bobby Jindal is a very promising politician, and I oppose the stimulus because I thought it was poorly drafted. But to come up at this moment in history with a stale “government is the problem,” “we can’t trust the federal government” - it’s just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic right now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill, but that idea that we’re just gonna - that government is going to have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that - In a moment when only the federal government is actually big enough to do stuff, to just ignore all that and just say “government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending,” it’s just a form of nihilism. It’s just not where the country is, it’s not where the future of the country is. There’s an intra-Republican debate. Some people say the Republican Party lost its way because they got too moderate. Some people say they got too weird or too conservative. He thinks they got too moderate, and so he’s making that case. I think it’s insane, and I just think it’s a disaster for the party. I just think it’s unfortunate right now.