Executive Temperament in Evidence: Bobby Jindal

On Wednesday, I posted a piece, drawing attention to what is now obvious even to Maureen Dowd: that, as an executive, Barack Obama is woefully incompetent. In that piece, I noted the propensity of the American people for electing to the Presidency men with ample executive experience – as generals, governors, cabinet secretaries, and the like. I remarked as well on the poor performance of the four Presidents they elected who did not have prior executive experience; and I suggested that it is time for the Republicans to ask who, in their number, has demonstrated a willingness and an ability to take charge and assume what the authors of The Federalist called responsibility.

In the course of the next few days, I propose to say a word or two about three of these Republicans. I will not discuss Sarah Palin, who displayed the requisite vigor and dispatch in her brief stint as Governor of Alaska, and I will not discuss Tim Pawlenty, who, over the last seven years, has shown genuine capacity as Governor of Minnesota. That worthy task I will leave to others – who know more than I do. Today, I will look at Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana.

Jindal is a remarkable young man. Born in 1971 to parents who migrated to Baton Rouge from India, he entered the freshman class at Brown University when he was twenty, was admitted to Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School when he was twenty-three, and that same year was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at New College, Oxford – where he took an M. Litt. in political science and wrote a dissertation entitled “A Needs-Based Approach to Health Policy.”

Instead of studying medicine or law, Jindal returned from Oxford to Louisiana, became Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals when he was 25 and President of the University of Louisiana system when he was 28, then shifted to Washington, DC where he became Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Planning and Evaluation at the age of thirty.

Two years later, he was back in Louisiana – where, in 2003, he ran for Governor in the state’s open primary, led in the first round, and lost in the runoff; where, in 2004, he was elected to Congress with 78% of the vote; where in 2006, was re-elected with 88% of the vote; and where, in 2007, he was chosen Governor, the first non-white man to have been elected to the governorship in that state and the first non-incumbent ever to have made it to the top without a runoff.

Jindal took over in Louisiana two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and put on display the incompetence and corruption besetting the state government and the city government in New Orleans. With dispatch and vigor, he then set out to clean up Louisiana politics, streamline state government, and put the state’s budget in order, all of which, insofar as these things are possible in that state, he did.

In August, 2008, when Hurricane Gustav threatened New Orleans and the Louisiana coast, Jindal’s Louisiana was ready for the crisis, and he and his administration did what his predecessor had notably failed to do at the time of Katrina: arrange for an orderly evacuation of the city and the coastal areas.

In the wake of the oil spill occasioned by BP’s mismanagement of the Deepwater Horizon, he has moved heaven and earth in an heroic effort to protect the Louisiana coastlands. As I pointed out on Wednesday, a poll recently taken by Public Policy Polling shows that, in Louisiana, “63% of voters approve of the job he’s doing,” which is the highest approval rating that this left-liberal polling operation “has found for any Senator or Governor so far in 2010. There’s an even higher level of support, at 65%, for how he’s handled the aftermath of the spill.”

Alexander Hamilton once argued that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Bobby Jindal is nothing if not energetic. He is, in fact, everything that a republican executive ought to be. Put bluntly, he is the sort of man that one would want to have next to one in a foxhole. He is smart as a whip, and he is inclined to take the initiative. If his response to President Obama’s first State of the Union Address left television viewers disappointed, we should keep in mind that, when 2012 comes around, Americans will be apt to pay more attention to demonstrated executive capacity than to eloquence in mouthing pious platitudes.