In the past few weeks, Bobby Jindal has been attacked for insisting that Europe allows Muslims to control special “no-go zones,” belittled by the Weekly Standard for offering a “bizarre, anti-intellectual” position on overturning Obamacare, and dismissed as an underachieving lightweight for the Republican 2016 nomination.

The Louisiana governor is relishing it all.


During a 40-minute interview in Washington late last week, an energized Jindal hit back at his critics on the right and left, dismissing them as elitist hacks who can’t stand the idea of an Ivy League-educated, unapologetic conservative. He accused GOP bosses in Washington of trying to sanitize the nomination battle and “get us to stop being so rude.” He blasted right-leaning writers who’ve criticized him, saying they’re just out to curry favor with the editorial page of The New York Times and get booked on the Sunday shows. And the 43-year-old governor argued that some Republicans are fine with crony capitalism, as long as their pockets are being lined.

It’s all part of a concerted effort by the likely presidential candidate to run as the purest anti-Washington conservative in the GOP field — one who unlike, say, Ted Cruz, boasts years of executive experience.

“There’s this tendency amongst even conservative elites to back away from our principles,” Jindal told POLITICO at the offices of the Republican Governors Association. “We need to be unafraid. … We don’t need to apologize for our beliefs.”

Jindal, cognizant that he’s an early dark horse for the nomination, seems to be seeking out controversy wherever he can.

He has been so unbending in arguing that Obamacare must be completely scrapped and repealed, for example, that a writer for the conservative Weekly Standard criticized him last week for offering a “bizarre, anti-intellectual jeremiad.” The conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru warned in another column that Jindal’s replacement plan for the health law is “unsuitable” because it “would cause millions of people to lose their coverage.”

Jindal argues that any Republican replacement plan must focus on reducing costs and not replacing taxes with new revenue hikes.

“I said famously in ’12 that we can’t be the party of no, that we can’t be the stupid party,” he added. “We’re beginning to realize we have to offer solutions, especially now that we’re in the majority in both chambers. But there’s still a reluctance to go all the way and stand up for our conservative principles.”

The son of Indian immigrants has refused to back away from his speech in London last month in which he warned about “no-go zones” in Europe. Jindal publicly ripped Michael Gerson, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, for accusing him in a Washington Post column of fear-mongering when it comes to radical Islam.

His team knew ahead of time that his speech would rile critics, but perhaps he didn’t fully appreciate how much of the backlash would come from the right.

Asked about criticism from commentators, Jindal said: “Too many conservatives come to this town, and they want to be liked by The New York Times. It’s pretty easy to be a ‘smart’ conservative. … All you have to do is criticize your own party. … All of a sudden you’re a genius. They say, ‘He must be a really smart guy. We need to book him on our shows. We need to write good editorials about him.’ It’s not hard to do that.”

This is a point that clearly exasperates and occupies significant mind-share within Jindal’s camp. Smart people in Washington assume that an Ivy League alum and Rhodes scholar must be pandering when he takes positions at odds with GOP elites, including advocating for a constitutional amendment to let states ban gay marriage, says longtime Jindal strategist Curt Anderson.

“The option that the chattering class refuses to consider is that he’s right,” said Anderson. “The elites can simply not accept or even consider the notion that a smart person would not agree with them or would see the world differently.”

Anderson says Jindal deserves to be in a category of his own: an authentic, culturally conservative, evangelical Catholic who was shaped profoundly by growing up in Baton Rouge.

“Bobby Jindal is an intellectual who enjoys LSU football, as well as hunting and killing ducks, and then eating them,” Anderson half-jokes.

Jindal said that he’s always been “a principled conservative across the board,” but “people may be paying more attention now or hearing it now.”

As he moves toward a likely announcement for president, which aides say would come sometime in the first half of the year, Jindal is talking a lot like a conservative populist, using the language of “us” and “them” — whether he’s referring to GOP elites or Democrats.

The “them” includes some unnamed Republicans in Washington whom Jindal said “are comfortable with crony capitalism. … Their only complaints about the Democratic-run Congress were that they weren’t getting the special deals. They don’t mind the deals; they just want them to benefit their clients.”

He criticized top party officials in the capital for imposing new rules that may make it harder for an insurgent candidate to win the nomination, including by cutting the number of primary debates in half. Many in the tea party movement saw the move by the Republican National Committee as a power play to anoint an establishment favorite earlier.

“We should rebel against this idea that the leadership is going to somehow narrow the field,” said Jindal.

“There’s a big movement within our party … that they think that we’re the great unwashed,” he added. “They want to clean us up and put us in a box and try to get us to stop being so rude and outspoken and harsh. And they say, ‘Look, why can’t we just all come together and compromise?’”

He went on to warn that his party is too beholden to big business and complain that corporate interests are behind the intra-GOP push for both “amnesty” and the Common Core testing standards. Immigration and education are two key issues on which the governor is setting himself apart from Jeb Bush, even as he steadfastly avoids criticizing him by name.

Jindal advisers note that he remains relatively undefined compared to the other 2016 contenders, including among GOP primary voters in the early states. They joke that a lot of people might remember him only from his poorly delivered State of the Union response six years ago. In early polling, other candidates with much higher name ID, such as Cruz, are also polling in the single digits.

Jindal, on the other hand, does not have high negatives among GOP base voters; those who know enough about him to offer an opinion tend to like him.

At this early phase of the nominating process, there is a lot of chatter about what “lane” a candidate will fit into. Jeb Bush is in the establishment lane with Chris Christie, for instance. Who will appeal most to social conservatives? Jindal advisers believe that no one but the libertarian Rand Paul has any lane to himself.

If he runs, Jindal would try to fill several lanes as a full-spectrum conservative. He’s an outspoken social conservative. He’s a hawk. He’s a policy wonk. But mainly he would be angling to be the smartest alternative on the right to whoever emerges as the favorite of the GOP establishment, whether it’s Bush or someone else.

Through his policy-focused nonprofit, Jindal has rolled out plans on energy, defense, health care and education. He recently changed the name of his federal political action committee to match a super PAC that was set up to back a potential presidential bid. Both are called “Believe Again.”

Jindal said he has no plans to play up his Indian-American heritage in a presidential campaign; he likes to say that he is against hyphenating Americans. He dismissed a controversy over a portrait hanging in the state capitol in Baton Rouge that shows Jindal with an almost white skin complexion, but he admits he worries about the rise of identity politics in both parties.

“We don’t need to become a bunch of whiners,” Jindal said of Republicans. “We don’t need to be the next big victim class. … Absolutely I worry that it’s very tempting to fall in this trap.”

“Every four years, you’ll have Republicans complain that the mainstream media is liberal and biased,” he added near the end of the interview. “It is, always has been, always will be. Get over it. Talking about it is not going to change it. The best thing to do is … go around them and make your case as forcefully as you can.”