Bobby gets a major writeup in the Post. No "posting error!"
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Not Quite Bubba vs. Bubba
Louisiana Governor's Contest Defies Stereotypes
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 14, 2003; Page A09
LAFAYETTE, La., Nov. 13 -- The Republican candidate for governor in Louisiana is Bobby Jindal, a wunderkind son of Indian immigrants, dark-complexioned Rhodes scholar and health policy wonk. The Democrat is Lt. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a soothing Cajun grandmother easily flustered in debates.
What's a Bubba to do?
"Listen, man, we're looking at a guy who's not even from this country! And then we're looking at a woman!" said Jubal Vallot, 38, a handyman in Lafayette sporting tattoo-spangled forearms, a Chevy pickup truck and a fist-size clump of keys at his belt.
He hooted and shook his head at the outlandishness of the selection.
"I go to church, I believe in the good Lord and this 'n' that. I never ever dreamed in my whole life -- I been right here in Louisiana -- that I'd be in this kind of dilemma."
Vallot's dilemma is the sort that has been rare in this conservative Deep South state with its richly corrupt political past: a pair of untainted, nearly equally conservative candidates in Saturday's runoff election, running a relatively clean -- if snarky -- race for the job held by Huey Long and a succession of other, somewhat more life-size white males.
But don't think that Louisiana politics have gone pallid. For a victory by the 32-year-old Jindal -- most polls show him with a lead -- would not only complete a Republican sweep of four straight gubernatorial races in 40 days, including those in California, Mississippi and Kentucky. It would also crown one of the most improbable political sagas in memory and, say analysts, thrust Jindal instantly into the GOP's orbit of rising stars.
"This guy has never been elected to anything and he's never run for anything, and he's run practically a perfect race," said Ed Renwick, director of the Institute of Politics at Loyola University in New Orleans.
With shrewd use of media and his own youth, vigor and rapid-fire, bullet-pointed command of policy, analysts say, Jindal has managed to fashion an unlikely coalition that includes moderate Republican suburbanites, some urban blacks and Democrats, and socially conservative rural whites -- Bubbas, as they are affectionately known in the local vernacular.
He has been aided by a generalized sense of despair and longing for change in a state whose relative poverty -- Louisiana ranks among the bottom 10 states in many indicators of prosperity -- led 75,000 more people to leave the state than move in between 1995 and 2000.
But analysts say Jindal has also capitalized on a double-barreled media strategy in which he courts conservatives in radio ads that deride liberals, Hollywood and gun control while appealing to moderates in television commercials that portray him as a pragmatic "problem solver." He also emphasizes his faith; he is a devout Catholic who converted from Hinduism in high school.
Blanco, 60, is a political veteran who has managed to ruffle few feathers in her long career in public office, most recently as the state's tourism czar in her capacity as lieutenant governor. Seeking some chink in the armor of Jindal's résumé, she has thumped him as a young, inexperienced and callous bureaucrat, a heartless know-it-all who was heedless to the human suffering he caused as a budget-cutting chief of the state's health system in the mid-1990s. She says some 60,000 people were dumped from the state's Medicaid rolls under Jindal's watch, a figure he and the state health department insist is wildly exaggerated.
"The ship of state does not come with training wheels," Blanco has said.
Though a Democrat, she is hardly less conservative than Jindal. A state legislator and official for 20 years, Blanco opposes new taxes, abortion and an increase in the minimum wage and embraces Catholicism and gun owners' rights. During one of the candidates' five televised debates, Blanco went so far as to hold up her hunting license, appealing to the state's gun owners by setting herself apart from the buttoned-down Jindal, who has never owned a firearm.
Jindal has fought back by noting that Blanco's platform consists more of summits and study panels than specific policy plans -- of which he has armloads. But the fact that there is little to divide them ideologically has apparently helped Jindal with black voters, who make up about 30 percent of the electorate, analysts say. Given a choice between almost equally conservative candidates -- both of whom oppose affirmative action -- a number of prominent black leaders have decided to throw in their lot with Jindal, who seems to hold out more hope of change. And black politicians say Jindal also helped his cause by rejecting a campaign visit from President Bush.
Jindal won the endorsement of the state's most prominent black politician, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, as well as other luminaries such as C.O. Simpkins of Shreveport, a '60s civil rights activist who once was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vice president in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The result is that recent polls show Jindal with the support of more than 10 percent of black voters -- at least twice the usual total for a Republican candidate here.
"If you close eyes and you didn't see the 'D' or the 'R,' how would you determine which one belongs to which party?" said Donald Cravins, a black state senator from Lafayette who cannot remember ever supporting a Republican for statewide office before -- but is clearly impressed with Jindal. "But [Jindal] has left the race issue out of it all together and he's not tried to entice white voters by alienating black voters. And when you look at him you think he's a minority, too."
Yet at the same time, Jindal has managed to appeal to deeply conservative Louisianans like Vallot, the handyman, a self-confessed Bubba who twice voted for white supremacist David Duke in the '90s -- and said he'd vote for him again if he could. (Duke currently resides in federal prison.) "It's hard to believe I'm even going to look at this man -- at first he almost looked to me like an Iraqi," Vallot said, speaking of Jindal. "But I tell you, he talks so smart, and he's hitting the hammer right on the nailhead."
In fact, Jindal is not from another country; he was born in Baton Rouge shortly after his parents, originally from the Punjab, immigrated to the United States. Named Piyush by his parents, Jindal, when barely a toddler, changed his name to Bobby, taking the name from the youngest of the "Brady Bunch" boys.
After a star-studded academic career, Jindal so impressed the new Republican governor of Louisiana, Mike Foster, that at the age of 24 he was named the state's secretary of health and hospitals and put in charge of a $6 billion annual budget.
Foster, 73, who by law is leaving office after eight years, anointed Jindal as his chosen successor earlier this year. At the time Jindal was a top health official in the Bush administration.
He started at single digits in the polls, but by the fall he had vaulted into the lead in the state's quirky open-to-all-parties primary. Running against five candidates, each old enough to be his parent, Jindal finished first with 33 percent of the vote in the first-round vote in early October.
Blanco ran second, but, collecting support from the Democratic also-rans, she began the runoff campaign with a substantial lead over Jindal. Jindal quickly closed the gap in the polls and then crept ahead.
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