Bobby Jindal spent Tuesday and Wednesday in New York, dropping by Fox News several times for on-air interviews. The Louisiana governor, who is eyeing a 2016 presidential bid, also dined yesterday with some of the city’s top Republican donors, including the financier and philanthropist Roger Hertog, chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute; hedge-fund managers Paul Singer and Paul Isaac; venture capitalist Ken Abramowitz; and investment manager and Brown University chancellor Tom Tisch.
The breakfast meeting, which took place in Hertog’s Manhattan office on Wednesday morning, lasted for approximately 90 minutes. After ten minutes of opening remarks, the group of about 25 peppered Jindal with questions which, according to one attendee, were heavily focused on policy.
The Hertog breakfast is becoming something of a right-of-passage for presidential contenders as they pass through New York. After dining with prominent supply-side journalists and economists last month, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker attended a breakfast organized by Hertog and, as with Jindal, held in his office. The breakfasts are not fundraisers, where big checks are the price of admittance, but rather less formal meet-and-greet events that offer politicians the opportunity to get to know some of the donors who will do the most to shape the 2016 landscape, and vice versa.
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Singer in particular is widely considered to cultivate the most sophisticated Republican donor network outside of the one created by Charles and David Koch. Unlike the libertarian-inflected Koch orbit, Singer’s network has a more hawkish, internationalist bent.
#related#Though several of the party’s biggest donors have signed on to Jeb Bush’s nascent campaign early on, a large number of the GOP’s largest benefactors remain undecided about whom to back in the primary as it gets underway or whether to back anyone at all.
As the prospective candidates pass through Hertog’s office, they are trying to change that. A Jindal source says the governor picked up a few supporters along the way.