Louisiana’s long-standing economic and institutional problems are partly to blame for its governor’s decline in popularity. Photograph by Kitra Cahana / Getty

Maybe anywhere, but certainly in slow-moving Louisiana, Bobby Jindal is an unusual politician. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a McKinsey consultant, the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, the president of the University of Louisiana System, and an official in the George W. Bush Administration—all before the age of thirty. Jindal then began running for office, aiming high from the very beginning. He ran for governor and finished a creditable second, served two terms in Congress, and then ran for governor again, and won, in 2007, at the age of thirty-six.

Jindal had a real honeymoon during his first year in office. He seemed to represent pure technocratic competence, a nearly unknown trait in the history of governance in Louisiana. He improved the state’s finances, its health system, and its hurricane preparation. In retrospect, the peak of his career may have been in early 2009, when he was selected to give the official Republican response to Barack Obama’s first State of the Union Address.

It wasn’t necessarily a gift to Jindal to offer him the chance to oppose a popular new President’s efforts to address the financial crisis, and, indeed, Jindal came across as tinny and ideological to the point of cluelessness. We may think that we want politicians who have firm convictions, but there’s a reason that we don’t have many of them. Jindal is drawn to rigid, relentlessly pure positions, and, unlike most Republican politicians, he takes them on both economic and social issues. A Hindu-to-Catholic convert, he’s historically anti-tax, pro-gun, anti-social program, anti-abortion, and anti-gay marriage. On a recent trip to England, he insisted that London has “no-go zones,” Muslim neighborhoods that outsiders cannot enter.

Back in Louisiana, Jindal has gone from being very popular to being very unpopular. This is partly because the public’s love for politicians often deteriorates, and partly a punishment for his obvious interest in becoming President, but it mostly has to do with Louisiana’s perpetual economic weakness. Louisiana has all the textbook problems of a resource-extraction economy: a poor education system, poor infrastructure, an excessive dependence on taxing business, and a scary degree of exposure to fluctuations in commodity prices. The fall in the price of oil, by far Louisiana’s most valuable resource, inexorably created a budget crisis for the state government, and all the solutions available to Jindal involve making people angry at him.

In the wake of last week’s murders at a movie theatre in Lafayette, Jindal went on national television and opened up the tiniest space between himself and the gun lobby, by pointing out that in Louisiana, it’s illegal for someone who has been involuntarily committed to a mental institution (like John Russell Houser, the Lafayette murderer) to buy a gun. But, at this point, Jindal occupies a place near the rear of the large pack of Republican Presidential candidates, and it’s not likely that he will be able to reposition himself as more moderate in order to improve his standing—or that he’d want to, or that it would be plausible. (Not long ago, he moved to the right on education by renouncing his previous support of the Common Core standards.) The country seems to have become considerably more liberal than it was when Jindal set his course as a true-blue conservative purist.

We are less than a month away from the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Louisiana coast. We can expect to be served a series of optimistic narratives about rebuilding by the press and by campaigning politicians, and there will be no reason to doubt these individual stories—the neighborhood rebuilt, the new school performing well. Remember, though, that Louisiana hasn’t budged much from its traditional near-the-bottom ranking in family income, education, and violent crime. This isn’t Bobby Jindal’s fault. A very long time ago, Louisiana was a rich state, but that was thanks to a Faustian bargain with slavery whose effects are still palpable; the American democratic miracle never truly took hold there. The state entangles its nationally ambitious politicians in its never-ending problems.