Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is set to launch his presidential campaign — or, as a top adviser puts it, to make a “major announcement” — on June 24 in New Orleans.
Jindal will enter the Republican field with something of an identity crisis.
He remains the policy wunderkind he always has been: His think tank, America Next, has for the past two years been devoted to churning out policy proposals on education, foreign policy, energy, and health care that make it easy to see, from a legislative perspective, what a Jindal administration would look like.
At the same time, the Rhodes Scholar has also become a self-styled populist, embracing Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson and positioning himself as a champion of the Christian Right. He has called for a spiritual revival across the country and hammered home the message that religious liberty is under attack.
And he has increasingly linked the fight for religious liberty to the fight for free speech. “You may think that I was defending the Robertsons simply because I am the governor of their home state, the great state of Louisiana,” Jindal told Liberty University graduates last year. “You would be wrong about that. I defended them because they have every right to speak their minds.”
He’s also used his authority on policy issues to bolster his bona fides with the far Right, at times stoking the ire of the party’s leading wonks. Jindal has derided some of them as “cheap Democrats” for arguing in favor of preserving Obamacare’s existing levels of insurance coverage because doing away with it would cause too much disruption in the marketplace.
Jindal’s advisers and strategists think Obamacare will be one of the leading issues in the presidential race, as it has been in every election since the law’s passage in 2010, and that Jindal, who ran Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals at the age of 24, can distinguish himself by virtue of his ability to talk about the issue with great authority.
Wrapping up his second term as governor, Jindal’s approval ratings are sagging in Louisiana, and he’s hovered around 1 percent in national polls. But a recent Public Policy Polling survey found that he has one of the highest favorability ratings of any Republican contender in New Hampshire.
And this is certainly a year when surprises can, and will, happen.