Jindal aide accuses liberals of 'race-baiting' on portrait

Bobby Jindal’s chief of staff is accusing liberals of “race-baiting” after a photograph spread on social media was falsely assumed to be the Louisiana governor’s official portrait.

Louisiana political blogger Lamar White tweeted out a photo of a painting on Tuesday with the caption “This is Bobby Jindal’s official portrait,” showing a pale version of the first Indian-American governor of a U.S. state.


Jindal’s chief of staff, Kyle Plotkin, was quick to respond by tweeting a photo of a different painting of the Louisiana governor at White.

“That’s not the official portrait. Constituent loaned it. This 1’s official. Thx 4 ur race-baiting tweet,” Plotkin tweeted.

Plotkin then began retweeting examples of what he described as “liberals who are trolling me and think that the Governor looks insufficiently brown in the painting.”

Jindal’s office continued to accuse liberals of being “fixated on race” on Wednesday. The governor’s communications director Michael Reed told POLITICO in an email, “Liberals are fixated on race. An MSNBC commentator recently accused the Governor of ‘trying to scrub some of the brown off his skin,’ and now liberal bloggers are using a portrait painted and loaned to our office by a constituent to make the same point.”

Reed continued, “Liberalism has failed on policy and is bankrupt of ideas, but that is no excuse for race baiting.”