This is the second part of two posts analyzing Louisiana's 2003 gubernatorial election, in which Republican candidate Bobby Jindal narrowly lost to lieutenant governor Kathleen Blanco. It will focus on racial dynamics in the 2003 election. The previous part can be found here.
Race and Bobby Jindal's 2003 Run
In my previous post, I began analyzing the electoral coalition that voted for Mr. Jindal. As a map of the election below indicates, he drew support heavily from the New Orleans suburbs, while doing extremely poorly in the rural north:
This is the first part of two posts analyzing Louisiana's 2003 gubernatorial election, in which Republican candidate Bobby Jindal narrowly lost to lieutenant governor Kathleen Blanco. The second part can be found here.
Bobby Jindal's Strange Coalition
In 2003, an ambitious Bobby Jindal ran for Louisiana governor against Democratic candidate Kathleen Blanco. Despite holding a narrow polling lead throughout most of the campaign, Mr. Jindal ended up losing by a three-point margin.
The story of the coalition that voted for Mr. Jindal constitutes quite the interesting tale. It is much different from the Republican base as commonly envisioned in the Deep South.
To begin, let's take a look at a map of the election - which is substantially different from most modern electoral maps. Here it is:
Baton Rouge (FNS)-Facing both a massive oil slick from a sunken offshore drilling platform and a second year of declining tourism revenues along the Louisiana Gulf Coast caused by high gas prices, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal today introduced a new tourism promotion that he reports is going to "...make lemons into lemonade".
Jindal, flanked by British Petroleum's Director of Marketing Dick Timoneous and the Executive Director of the Louisiana State Tourism Board, Jenna Talia, announced that the "All The Oil You Can Carry Festival" would officially commence today just east of New Orleans, and last at least through the month of May.
For a libertarian, Maher is sounding pleasantly liberal these days. Seeing the calamity of conservative misrule has probably had an effect on him. Anyway, at 2:30 in, Maher channels, well...me...(or Rep Clyburn anyway), in taking on the anti-government ethos expressed in Jindal's speech.
He also beautifully rebuts the conservative mantra against single payer, that "bureaucrats" would be making health care decisions instead of doctors, by noting that, under the current US system, it is insurance companies who are more often making those decisions anyway. At least the government bureaucrats wouldn't stand to get a bonus for denying care to people who need it. (Living in a country with single payer UHC, I know that government bureaucrats don't make health care decisions for me anyway, but even if they did, I'd prefer them to insurance companies)
Today It makes me very proud to see a 37 year old fellow Indian-American, literally one of us, become such a shining star in the higher circles in US. Granted, the Republican Party is not very popular in US these days due to the recent harmful influence of the right wing of the party that forced a narrow and one-sided agenda on the nation. For the welfare of US the Republican Party must correct its course and get back on track as the party of Abraham Lincoln that abolished slavery in US and fought a civil war to end the oppression of African-Americans in US.
The leader to bring back the Republican Party to its original moorings of fairness, free enterprise and efficient government is Gov Bobby Jindal. America became a great nation not by pursuing the regressive socialist policies favored in Europe and Asia, but by following the unique free enterprise policies that encourage initiative in every individual and rewards them. We all who come from South Asia know very well what following socialist policies means for a nation.
Universal health care?
Leaving aside the question of whether anything Obama is proposing resembles actual socialism, can somebody please illuminate for me what is the monolithic/reducible/essential racial memory of South Asians that he avers regarding socialism?
fairness, free enterprise and efficient government
Fairness and efficient government are core values of liberals, and have been recognized as such since FDR.
As for free enterprise, to thrive it needs the vigorous regulation and regulators that only the Democrats are willing to provide, so count free enterprise among the liberal's core values too.
I will be very impressed if Jindal can lead the conservatives into liberalism...
President Barack Obama is a youthful, well educated son of an immigrant, and Republicans are clearly trying to get some of his magic to rub off on them, so they asked Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal-the youthful, well educated son of immigrants-to give the response to Obama's speech last night. Good idea to have a fresh face given the GOP brand is in such disrepair. The problem is that he gave the same old arguments Republicans and conservatives have been giving us for a very long time.
Republicans made those arguments the last eight years, saying that tax cuts and smaller government would lead to prosperity. The results were, well, shall we say, less than delightful.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's speech last night was yet another example that, despite vast Democratic gains in the 2006 and 2008 elections, conservatives do not believe that this partisan shift has been accompanied by an ideological shift. Jindal's Republican response read from the exact same conservative script about government is part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, that we have been hearing for decades. While David Brooks referred to such a belief as "a form of nihilism," Jindal is hardly the only conservative clinging to this false hope. The numbers these commenters rely upon are the post-election ideological self-identification numbers from Pew, showing that significantly more Americans still self-identify as conservative than liberal.
However, the simple fact is that when polling firms stop asking Americans abstract questions about what vague ideological term they call themselves, and start asking Americans about what they actually believe, an enormous ideological shift is apparent. For example, last month the Harris poll found a huge popular shift in favor of government programs over the last three years (more in the extended entry):
But Democratic leaders in Congress rejected this approach. Instead of trusting us to make wise decisions with our own money, they passed the largest government spending bill in history -- with a price tag of more than $1 trillion with interest.
Is that how we account for spending now? Anyone care to measure the cost of the $3 Trillion dollar Iraq Warwith interest?
Jindal's wingnut cred probably went through the roof with that. He can tendentiously mangle statistics!
STATE BLOGS
