Alan Greenblatt, a staff writer for Governing, is a former reporter for NPR and CQ.

In 2013 Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal called on the GOP to “stop being the stupid party.” A former Rhodes scholar with serious policy chops, he appeared perfectly positioned to elevate the discussion of ideas. Instead, Jindal has chosen to run in 2016 as the stupid party’s standard-bearer.

As Jindal prepares to make his White House bid official on Wednesday, he is struggling to break the one percent mark in national polls. That puts him a dozen places behind the top-tier triumvirate of Walker, Bush and Rubio. It’s possible Jindal will emerge from the back of the pack at some stage of the game, but it’s just as likely the dumbed-down version of Jindal will never catch fire.


A governor who reshaped his state by overhauling the education and Medicaid systems now hardly talks substance at all. In fairness, he has released detailed plans on taxes and education, but he routinely spends his time on the stump throwing red meat to the most conservative parts of his party. During a visit to Europe early this year, Jindal complained about “no-go zones” on the continent where imposition of sharia law had made non-Muslims unwelcome. Appearing at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference on Friday, Jindal complained corporate America had entered into an “unnatural alliance with the radical left” in working to block religious freedom bills at the state level.

His pander approach hasn’t worked for him. “He is smart, he is policy knowledgeable,” says Henry Olsen, a conservative analyst at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, “but rather than build a public persona around his strengths, he has crafted a public persona around other’s people’s strengths.”

Jindal is running in the most crowded part of an enormous field. Someone like Ohio Gov. John Kasich might try to find room by running to the left, but better-known politicians crowd out Jindal on the right. Marco Rubio has connected better telling his American dream and assimilation story, while Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz manage to bring more passion to the narrative that faith is under siege.

Jindal remains at best second choice for seemingly every segment of the GOP base. Melissa Clouthier, a conservative blogger based in Texas, calls Jindal a “fantastic politician,” but his candidacy has been undermined by simple physics, she says. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space. “There are governors with his level of success,” Clouthier says. “There are minority candidates who can communicate better. There are ideologues who are more pure.”

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It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Bobby Jindal wasn’t supposed to be an afterthought. When President Obama was first elected, Jindal was embraced by Republicans as a promising alternative, constantly written up in the national media as an important and notably non-white conservative voice, the GOP’s “anointed boy wonder” as the Washington Post described him in 2009. The son of Indian immigrants, Jindal was a Rhodes scholar who served as Louisiana’s health secretary at the tender age of 24 and president of the state’s university system not long after. President George W. Bush appointed him an assistant secretary of the Department Health and Human Services when he was just 30 years old. Jindal lost his first run for governor in 2003, was subsequently elected twice to Congress and was elected governor in 2007.

As governor, Jindal has scored some major conservative victories. He likes to brag about—and sometimes exaggerate—how much spending and the size of the state workforce have shrunk on his watch. But there is no economic “Louisiana miracle” for Jindal to brag about. Despite the ambition of his education and Medicaid privatization efforts, Jindal lacks the sort of signature accomplishment at home—like Scott Walker’s defeat of the labor unions in Wisconsin—that resonates strongly with voters elsewhere. Even in Louisiana, the state’s recent budget woes have dragged Jindal’s approval ratings down to about the 30 percent mark.

Jindal has sought to compensate for his weak standing as governor with attention-grabbing rhetoric around the country. Standing outside the White House following a bipartisan meeting of governors with the president in February, Jindal broke from the usual anodyne script for such occasions. Instead, he declared that Obama was “unfit to be commander in chief,” having “disqualified” himself with his response—or lack thereof—to “radical Islamic terrorism.” The following month, Jindal signed onto the controversial letter GOP senators issued to Iranian leaders, questioning Obama’s authority to negotiate a nuclear arms deal.

After religious freedom bills drew opposition in Indiana and Arkansas this spring, amidst concerns they could lead to anti-gay discrimination, Jindal’s own legislature rejected similar legislation. Jindal quickly issued a “marriage and conscience” executive order to protect business owners who might refuse to offer services to same-sex couples who are getting married. “I don’t know about you, but sometimes it feels like evangelical Christians are the only group that it’s okay to discriminate against in this society,” Jindal said at a Good Friday prayer breakfast in Iowa.

Jindal’s transformation from a policy wonk into an ideologue has been a long time in the making. George Cross, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette political scientist, speculates that Jindal has sought to make himself the focal point of national debates in order to make up for his own “charisma deficit.” Jindal’s shortcomings as a speaker were, in fact, put baldly on display when he was selected to give the official GOP response to Obama’s first address to Congress in 2009.

Making what amounted to his debut in the national spotlight, Jindal’s delivery was hesitant and almost sing-songy. He was widely excoriated, his man-child manner earning unflattering comparisons to Kenneth, the page on 30 Rock. “That was just a terrible appearance,” says David Yepsen, a veteran political observer who now runs a public policy institute at Southern Illinois University. “I’m not sure that he ever recovered.”

Other State of the Union responders have come across as boring or charismatically challenged. But unlike someone like Marco Rubio, whose water-guzzling response in 2013 was also panned, Jindal hasn’t had subsequent opportunities to change people’s minds. Despite that prominent flub, Rubio is widely considered the best speechmaker at the top of the GOP field. No one ranks Jindal so highly. And, as the governor of a relatively small state, Jindal lacks a platform that would allow him to make his views central to the national debates of the day. “Unlike senators, he’s not part of the big controversies in Washington,” notes Gary Bauer, a prominent social conservative who ran for president in 2000.

By “swinging for the fences” with his rhetoric, Jindal hasn’t shown himself in the best light, suggests Chris Broadwater, a Republican state legislator in Louisiana. “I don’t necessarily think his campaign reflects who he is, to be honest with you,” Broadwater says. “One on one, you probably would find him to be more knowledgeable than anyone else in the race.”

It’s possible and perhaps even probable that someone who doesn’t look like a winner now will offer a serious competitive challenge to the party’s frontrunners by the time Iowans gather to caucus in February. Jindal has as good a chance of emerging as anyone, suggests Bauer, president of the nonprofit American Values. “There’s certainly every reason for a conservative at the grassroots level to be excited about his candidacy and to consider him as one of the alternatives in 2016,” Bauer says.

Maybe so. To this point, however, Jindal has not been able to stake out positions that distinguish him among the many GOP aspirants, or proven himself to be the best salesman for widely-shared ideas.

As he officially seeks to break into the presidential league, there’s not much reason to expect that Jindal will end up justifying the kind of hope and hype that marked his early career. “The idea of him excited people once,” Henry Olsen says, “but the fact of him does not.”