NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 21 — The first words from Bobby Jindal to his supporters after he won the Louisiana governor’s race on Saturday night were not about his victory, but L.S.U.’s triumph over Auburn the same day.
The message could not have been clearer: I’m one of you, a normal, red-blooded football-loving Louisiana guy. It is a theme that seems to have informed the youthful Republican congressman’s every step, from his decision at age 4 to jettison his given name of Piyush for that of a character in the television series “The Brady Bunch” to the attentive faith-infused courting of conservatives that led to his victory on Saturday with 54 percent of the vote.
Mr. Jindal’s reach for normalcy only highlights, though, what is glaringly obvious to anyone who sees and hears the slight 36-year-old son of immigrants from India. He is a highly unusual politician, becoming the nation’s first Indian-American governor in a Southern state where race is inseparable from politics.
Still, Mr. Jindal offered something few others could to a state that is on its knees. Louisiana is more desperate than ever, a place where the glaring needs of its citizens evidently trumped considerations of race and ethnicity.
He has taken an already lengthy public policy résumé, mostly in health care, along with sterling educational credits (Brown University and Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar) and come back home instead of using his credentials as a ticket to escape, as many other accomplished Louisianans do.
Louisiana — largely impoverished, undereducated and unhealthy — has been left behind by whatever national prosperity has accrued in recent decades. Hurricane Katrina only knocked it back further. Mr. Jindal, outside the Louisiana mainstream but within the well-to-do 21st-century American one, seemed to offer a ticket to the latter.
Mr. Jindal is a technocrat and a Roman Catholic convert, a policy aficionado well-versed in free-market solutions to the crisis in health insurance and a proponent of “intelligent design” as an alternative theory to evolution, suggesting it may be appropriate in school science classes.
His ascent has delighted many Indian-Americans, who have never seen one of their own elected to such a high political position. Sanjay Puri, chairman of the U.S.-India Political Action Committee, predicted that Mr. Jindal would surprise doubters with the depth of his understanding on policy issues. Others, however, are cautious, saying that Mr. Jindal is out of the mainstream on issues that matter to Indian-Americans.
“The fact that he’s of Indian ancestry is a subject of jubilation,” said Vijay Prashad, professor of South Asian history at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking of the way Mr. Jindal has been portrayed in the Indian-American press. “But there’s a very shallow appreciation of who he really is. Once you scratch the surface, it’s really unpleasant.”
Mr. Jindal’s platform, though conscientiously detailed, was hardly revolutionary, and the campaign itself was a study in caution. Louisiana’s rickety fiscal structure went mostly ignored. And Mr. Jindal, intent on not jeopardizing a big lead in the polls, shunned reporters.
Though he was criticized during the campaign for talking relatively little about hurricane recovery in still-suffering New Orleans, he said Sunday he hoped to secure more federal assistance for homeowners and planned to meet with President Bush to discuss the region’s needs.
Piyush Jindal was born on June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge to Hindu parents who had come to the United States six months before so his mother could pursue a graduate degree in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. His father was an engineer from the Punjab region of India, the only one of nine siblings to attend high school. The younger Jindal, growing up in Baton Rouge, was not expected to come home from school with anything less than 100 on tests. Public high school in Baton Rouge was followed by Brown, where Mr. Jindal was Phi Beta Kappa, and a conversion to Roman Catholicism that Mr. Jindal has described in transformative terms. “I draw my definition of integrity from my Christian faith,” Mr. Jindal said during the campaign. “In my faith, you give 100 percent of yourself to God.”
“But we live in a pluralistic state,” he was careful to add.
After Oxford, a well-paid stint at the Washington consultants McKinsey and Company was followed by an interview for the job of secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals with the newly elected Republican governor of Louisiana, Mike Foster, in 1995. Mr. Jindal was 24; it was the biggest department in state government, and it was in serious financial trouble. He got the job despite Mr. Foster’s initial skepticism, made cuts and restored the department to financial stability; Louisiana still has one of the highest percentages of uninsured, however.
More high-level jobs followed in quick succession: chairman of a bipartisan Medicare reform commission in Washington, head of the statewide University of Louisiana system, assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services under Mr. Bush.
He and his wife, Supriya, returned to Louisiana to so he could run for governor in 2003. The Jindals have three young children, Celia, Shaan and Slade.
During that campaign, Mr. Jindal attacked liberals in radio advertisements and talked up his connections to Mr. Bush. The so-called bubba vote was nonetheless against him that year and he lost to the current governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who has chosen not to run again.
Mr. Jindal was elected to Congress from the New Orleans suburbs in 2004, and it was common knowledge that he was biding his time for another run at the governor’s mansion. His short time in Washington was unobtrusive, and he continued to campaign at home while others in the state’s Congressional delegation established a more forceful presence as hurricane recovery efforts unfolded.
Mr. Jindal’s biggest test comes now. Failure to lift Louisiana would be obvious. He said he arrived in Baton Rouge intent on “cleaning up the corruption” and determined to “show the voters and the entire country that we are serious about changing our reputation.”
Legislators in Huey Long’s state Capitol are sensitive to such suggestions, however. Mr. Jindal’s honeymoon could be short.
The message could not have been clearer: I’m one of you, a normal, red-blooded football-loving Louisiana guy. It is a theme that seems to have informed the youthful Republican congressman’s every step, from his decision at age 4 to jettison his given name of Piyush for that of a character in the television series “The Brady Bunch” to the attentive faith-infused courting of conservatives that led to his victory on Saturday with 54 percent of the vote.
Mr. Jindal’s reach for normalcy only highlights, though, what is glaringly obvious to anyone who sees and hears the slight 36-year-old son of immigrants from India. He is a highly unusual politician, becoming the nation’s first Indian-American governor in a Southern state where race is inseparable from politics.
Still, Mr. Jindal offered something few others could to a state that is on its knees. Louisiana is more desperate than ever, a place where the glaring needs of its citizens evidently trumped considerations of race and ethnicity.
He has taken an already lengthy public policy résumé, mostly in health care, along with sterling educational credits (Brown University and Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar) and come back home instead of using his credentials as a ticket to escape, as many other accomplished Louisianans do.
Louisiana — largely impoverished, undereducated and unhealthy — has been left behind by whatever national prosperity has accrued in recent decades. Hurricane Katrina only knocked it back further. Mr. Jindal, outside the Louisiana mainstream but within the well-to-do 21st-century American one, seemed to offer a ticket to the latter.
Mr. Jindal is a technocrat and a Roman Catholic convert, a policy aficionado well-versed in free-market solutions to the crisis in health insurance and a proponent of “intelligent design” as an alternative theory to evolution, suggesting it may be appropriate in school science classes.
His ascent has delighted many Indian-Americans, who have never seen one of their own elected to such a high political position. Sanjay Puri, chairman of the U.S.-India Political Action Committee, predicted that Mr. Jindal would surprise doubters with the depth of his understanding on policy issues. Others, however, are cautious, saying that Mr. Jindal is out of the mainstream on issues that matter to Indian-Americans.
“The fact that he’s of Indian ancestry is a subject of jubilation,” said Vijay Prashad, professor of South Asian history at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking of the way Mr. Jindal has been portrayed in the Indian-American press. “But there’s a very shallow appreciation of who he really is. Once you scratch the surface, it’s really unpleasant.”
Mr. Jindal’s platform, though conscientiously detailed, was hardly revolutionary, and the campaign itself was a study in caution. Louisiana’s rickety fiscal structure went mostly ignored. And Mr. Jindal, intent on not jeopardizing a big lead in the polls, shunned reporters.
Though he was criticized during the campaign for talking relatively little about hurricane recovery in still-suffering New Orleans, he said Sunday he hoped to secure more federal assistance for homeowners and planned to meet with President Bush to discuss the region’s needs.
Piyush Jindal was born on June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge to Hindu parents who had come to the United States six months before so his mother could pursue a graduate degree in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. His father was an engineer from the Punjab region of India, the only one of nine siblings to attend high school. The younger Jindal, growing up in Baton Rouge, was not expected to come home from school with anything less than 100 on tests. Public high school in Baton Rouge was followed by Brown, where Mr. Jindal was Phi Beta Kappa, and a conversion to Roman Catholicism that Mr. Jindal has described in transformative terms. “I draw my definition of integrity from my Christian faith,” Mr. Jindal said during the campaign. “In my faith, you give 100 percent of yourself to God.”
“But we live in a pluralistic state,” he was careful to add.
After Oxford, a well-paid stint at the Washington consultants McKinsey and Company was followed by an interview for the job of secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals with the newly elected Republican governor of Louisiana, Mike Foster, in 1995. Mr. Jindal was 24; it was the biggest department in state government, and it was in serious financial trouble. He got the job despite Mr. Foster’s initial skepticism, made cuts and restored the department to financial stability; Louisiana still has one of the highest percentages of uninsured, however.
More high-level jobs followed in quick succession: chairman of a bipartisan Medicare reform commission in Washington, head of the statewide University of Louisiana system, assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services under Mr. Bush.
He and his wife, Supriya, returned to Louisiana to so he could run for governor in 2003. The Jindals have three young children, Celia, Shaan and Slade.
During that campaign, Mr. Jindal attacked liberals in radio advertisements and talked up his connections to Mr. Bush. The so-called bubba vote was nonetheless against him that year and he lost to the current governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who has chosen not to run again.
Mr. Jindal was elected to Congress from the New Orleans suburbs in 2004, and it was common knowledge that he was biding his time for another run at the governor’s mansion. His short time in Washington was unobtrusive, and he continued to campaign at home while others in the state’s Congressional delegation established a more forceful presence as hurricane recovery efforts unfolded.
Mr. Jindal’s biggest test comes now. Failure to lift Louisiana would be obvious. He said he arrived in Baton Rouge intent on “cleaning up the corruption” and determined to “show the voters and the entire country that we are serious about changing our reputation.”
Legislators in Huey Long’s state Capitol are sensitive to such suggestions, however. Mr. Jindal’s honeymoon could be short.
referrenced by: NYtimes
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