What happened to Bobby Jindal?

He was the next wave of Republican. He was young and smart — a Rhodes scholar. He was the son of immigrants and the first Indian-American governor in this country’s history.

He had even bounced back from his disastrous rebuttal to President Obama’s first State of the Union address. (Personally, I thought that his claim of having participated in an exorcism performed on his friend in college would have been more of an issue than it was, but that was just me.)

Jindal had all the right rhetoric.

He told the syndicated columnist Cal Thomas: “As Republicans we don’t need to obsess about our opponents, we don’t need to define ourselves in opposition to our opponents. Let [Democrats] look backward; we need to look forward.”

In 2013, he demanded that the G.O.P. “stop being the stupid party.”

Jindal was the brainy Moses coming to deliver his people from the bondage of inanity. But that was then.