In the words of Smooth Jimmy Apollo, “When you’re right 52% of the time, you’re wrong 48% of the time.” That’s just the math. To put that in presidential campaign terms, when you start out with 20 candidates, you’re going to wind up with 19 losers. Bobby Jindal is now one of those losers.
On Tuesday, the current governor of Louisiana went on Brett Baier’s Fox News show and announced that he was suspending his campaign. He blamed circumstance: speaking of this “crazy, unpredictable” election season, he said, “I’ve come to the realization that this is not my time.”
He’s right; it’s not his time. But Bobby Jindal was never the candidate. Bobby Jindal, viable contemporary conservative, never existed.
Anyone could see his loss coming on day one. What no one could see coming was Donald Trump and Ben Carson sucking all the oxygen out of the Republican presidential race and sucking oxygen away from candidate after candidate. Nor could anyone have predicted that the Republican debates would be so crowded that the networks would create a preview debate merely for the lower tier.
The “kiddie table” debate structure was inherently unfair to candidates like Jindal and Rick Santorum; it remains unfair to Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie too. Jindal was no dumber or crazier than anyone on the main stage, and in fact he’s a brisker and more articulate speaker than 99% of candidates in any party. But the image of Jindal appearing at the “kiddie table” debates made him seem trivial. Why, when even the furniture and the room are telling you not to take him seriously, would you volunteer for this man? Why would you give him money?
Jindal’s answer to that question was that he’s good with money. But, despite an early career in which he converted a massive debt into a surplus as the Louisiana Secretary of Health and Hospitals (in his 20s, no less), Jindal cratered his own state’s finances. He was an unmistakable case study in the fact that sometimes you can cut spending and take everything else with it.
Jindal inherited an $800m budget surplus and converted it into $800m of tax cuts. Ignoring that the high times of post-Katrina federal money would come to an end, Jindal cut and cut while giving away subsidies to wealthy corporations; he wound up having to raid rainy-day funds, sell state assets and use one-time credits to paper over the holes he’d carved in the budget. By the time he announced his candidacy, the people subjected to his brand of conservatism were giving him a 28% approval rating and would have voted for Hillary Clinton over him by a 47-40 margin.
But a budget that fixes government by making it malfunction presents neither a liability nor a virtue in a field in which the only question to ask about each candidate’s tax plan is, “How many trillions over 10 will it add to the debt in the next decade?” Every other governor in the race was already running on some variant of the George W Bush “if it crippled my state, let’s try it on the rest of the country” fiscal model – and it’s not like contemporary conservatism acknowledges the existence of math anyway.
So if putting Louisiana in a sack and trying to drown it in the Gulf like a stray cat couldn’t get him noticed, he had to try something else. Bobby Jindal decided to go crazy.
It’s not as if he had to go very far to get there. Jindal famously once took part in an exorcism and wrote about it – not as the possessed, but still. He famously claimed – falsely, like that matters to conservatives these days – that there are autonomous “no-go zones” in English cities, where the ferocity of Sharia law in Muslim communities keeps out non-believers and even secular authorities. He farmed out the public school system to a voucher system that funded schools teaching facts like “dragons were real” and “man and dinosaurs lived together”. He’s spent nearly two years trying to be the “Fifth Beatle” to the Duck Dynasty guys and claiming there’s a war on Christians.
With little money and polling zero within the margin of error, Jindal took his crazier-than-thou pitch exclusively to Iowa, where quadrennially a few million fantasy-fearing souls try to convert the United States into an even more superstitious version of Savonarola’s Florence. Obamacare was going to use the power of health insurance to make them die. Someone was going to take their Bibles or their guns or their gun-shaped Bibles. Make the wrong choice, and this could be the last election of anyone’s lifetime.
Jindal’s strategy didn’t work, despite him logging more time there than any other Republican candidate, and it didn’t work because of who Bobby Jindal fundamentally is. He’s a Rhodes Scholar whose pitch to voters in his gubernatorial campaigns was as a technocratic whiz kid, someone who might work smarter (though not harder) – someone who works the levers of government for the people he served. He was never the kind of crazy that seemingly appeals to conservative voters these days. In 2012, following Mitt Romney’s loss, he even said that it was time for the Republicans to “stop being the stupid party”.
To make matters worse, in the debates, Jindal dropped the slooooow sing-songy cadence voters knew from his response to President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress – a sickly-sweet drawl like a trickle of Sazerac sinuously oozing across the surface of Lake Ponchartrain – and resumed his normal delivery of speaking about a thousand words per minute.
Jindal never understood something that Ted Cruz knows in his bones, which is that you gotta live in the gimmick. Cruz is no less intelligent than Jindal: he graduated cum laude from Princeton, went to Harvard Law and became Solicitor General of Texas. But Cruz never breaks character and, if he’s in public, he is 100% a fire-breathing jerkwad. He’s behaved like a senior member of the Senate on day one despite his junior status, then acted like he isn’t aware he’s not a member of the House of Representatives when they’re garnering all the headlines, threatened to break anything about the US government that he doesn’t like, and treated the First Amendment like it’s the founding document of a theocracy. Cruz almost certainly knows that all this is outrageous, but he also certainly knows that it works on voters.
Jindal just couldn’t pull it off.
Even leaving aside the change in his speech patterns, Bobby Jindal couldn’t be the authentic conservative candidate that people evidently need in this 2016 cycle. He insulted Donald Trump as a narcissist, but he could never effect the sui generis reality that Trump creates and defines around himself. He was too proud to subsume his intelligence under the Faulknerian idiot manchild guise of someone like Ben Carson. At best, he could lie emphatically like Carly Fiorina, without the big business cachet or the gender value in a race where the Democratic finalist will likely be Hillary Clinton.
Circumstances didn’t help, but they also didn’t make Bobby Jindal who he is. He was a semi-good-government conservative and a smart guy in a party that hates both: a party whose members consider self-destruction the proper function of government and self-adulatory ignorance something that somehow humiliates the other people who know what they’re talking about. He was the wrong man for this time. He might always be.
