Can a wonk win the nomination?
Bobby Jindal is making a bet, according to someone familiar with his thinking: “Ideas and smarts are going to be crucial in winning the presidential nomination.”
Jindal’s nascent 2016 campaign will be an exploration of the validity of this belief. When the Louisiana governor unveils his energy plan at the Heritage Foundation today, he will do so under the auspices of his ambitious attempt to “articulate and sell a national policy agenda to the country.” Consider it also a part of another ambitious plan, the second plank of a 2016 presidential platform and an attempt to persuade Republican primary voters that they should award the party’s nomination to a 43-year-old wonk.
Jindal seeks to persuade through policy proposals more than public spectacles. The energy plan follows the health-care proposal he released in April as an alternative to Obamacare. In October of last year, he founded the nonprofit group America Next, which is churning out these plans. Next will come proposals for jobs, education, and defense — taken together, they will make a rough presidential platform.
Jindal’s health-care plan did not earn rave reviews from many on the right. One conservative policy analyst who met and spoke with him about the plan says that the general feeling among his cohort was that the plan would be “politically explosive” and that it “involved too much disruption to be plausible.” The plan, says the analyst, was “designed for the Republican primary season, but not for the larger health-care debate.”
Nonetheless, Jindal is filling a policy void that most conservatives have long acknowledged and bemoaned. Florida senator Marco Rubio, who offered his own “policy agenda designed specifically for the 21st century” in a June speech at Michigan’s Hillsdale College, is the only other 2016 presidential contender on the Republican side who has so clearly laid out the planks of a would-be platform.
For Jindal, the rest of the preparation for a presidential run is taking place behind the scenes. “There’s been a lot going on that we don’t publicize,” says a source familiar with the governor’s political strategy. That includes six trips to New York this year for meetings with “a massive number of big donors.”
Most of Jindal’s potential rivals are taking a different tack. Texas senator Ted Cruz on Wednesday marched off stage when a group of Middle Eastern Christians booed his pro-Israel remarks, and he has sucked up media oxygen in the ensuing days; New Jersey governor Chris Christie led a trade delegation to Mexico earlier this month with a bevy of reporters; and Kentucky senator Rand Paul traveled to Guatemala in August with his political team and a documentary-film crew in tow.
Jindal’s lower profile is not to be mistaken for a lack of ambition. Earlier this month he told nationally syndicated radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt he’s “thinking and praying” about a presidential bid. He won’t stay out of the race, he said, “simply because I have friends running.” Last February, he was knocking on the door of Romney finance director Spencer Zwick, looking for introductions to the former Massachusetts governor’s top-dollar donors. He had already snapped up Jill Neunaber (who, notably, managed Romney’s Iowa campaign) to serve as executive director of America Next.
Perhaps most tellingly, Jindal has engineered a 180-degree reversal on the Common Core educational standards, which have increasingly come under attack from conservatives and which will undoubtedly play an important role in the presidential primary. An early supporter of the standards, Jindal began a prolonged struggle, in which he is still embroiled, to withdraw Louisiana from them, and is now suing the federal government over them, a move that should play well among the most conservative voters in early primary states such as Iowa and South Carolina.
The question hovering over Jindal is whether an Ivy League whiz kid can turn heads in a field of elbow-throwing candidates with established national profiles. “I have heard almost nothing on him,” says a major New York City–based Republican donor who served as a bundler for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, “which tells me he is not breaking through in the Northeast.” Jindal is not attending the annual Republican-party fundraiser hosted by New York Jets owner Woody Johnson. Scheduled for October 6, the event this year will include several potential 2016 candidates: Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and Ohio governor John Kasich.
Jindal is a Brown University graduate and Rhodes Scholar who became a McKinsey and Company management guru after he returned from Oxford. After two years there, just shy of 25, he went to work in the public sector running Louisiana’s department of health and hospitals. He has cultivated his image as wunderkind: To this day, he notes on his official biography that he went to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship only after he turned down admissions to medical and law schools at Harvard and Yale.
The governor’s longtime political consultant, former Republican National Committee political director Curt Anderson, met Jindal after the 2002 midterm elections at the request of former RNC chairman Haley Barbour. According to Anderson, Barbour told him that there was a “young guy over at HHS who’s thinking about running for governor of Louisiana.”
When Jindal, who was 31 at the time, emerged to meet him, Anderson was confounded. “I figured this must be his assistant,” he says, “because the notion of him running for governor of Louisiana was so funny.”
The meeting, suffice it to say, left him impressed.
“I thought, Man, I never met anybody like this,” Anderson says. “I told my colleagues, ‘There are only two problems: He’s 31 and he’s of Indian descent.’ And there was dead silence. And here we are.”
Republican primary voters might have the same initial reaction that Anderson did. Jindal proved it wrong then and is now embarking on a campaign to prove it wrong again, on a much bigger stage with much bigger stakes.
— Eliana Johnson is Washington editor of National Review.