Politics

Alert The Press: Bobby Jindal Is Pandering!

Matt K. Lewis Senior Contributor
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“Bobby Jindal is a bright guy and a fine governor,”writes Peter Wehner, “which is why it surprises me when he advances foolish ideas.”

… To which I respond: Peter Wehner is a bright guy and a fine columnist, so why is he surprised?

Hell, David Weigel spelled it out pretty simply a year ago, when he wrote: “Jindal’s rep is as a wunderkind who was put in charge of Louisiana’s hospital system at age 28. To be competitive in the Iowa caucuses, he needs to either pretend to be a schmuck or emphasize his heretofore-concealed schmucky tendencies.”

In the last year, not much has changed. “Take Jindal’s recent appearance on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” Wehner writes, “in which he pounded congressional Republicans for not pushing a strategy to oppose the president’s executive order on amnesty that would almost surely lead to a government shutdown.”

So here’s the thing. Bobby Jindal is smarter than you or me. He’s a Rhodes Scholar — but he wants to be president, which creates a dilemma. To woo base voters, he thinks he has to dumb down his message and play the anti-intellectual card — which is hard for him, inasmuch as he’s an intellectual.

So he pretends to be a pitchfork populist. But you can’t go halfway with this. You have to go all the way — you have to be the kind of person who evinces no shame in playing the populist all the while being a member of the elite (see Harvard Law’s Ted Cruz), and Jindal doesn’t have this same flexibility. You can’t be a temperamentally conservative or soft-spoken, which Jindal tends toward, either. And so it mostly looks pathetic.

The shame is that what he’s doing is perpetuating the problem. He is, of course, responding to incentives. And though I’m fond of saying, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” at some point, nothing changes until a few good men have the courage to stand up to a perverse game.

And the game involves something called the “Tragedy of the Commons.” It is in everyone’s collective interest on the right for conservatism to be seen as a respectable and intellectual movement and a coherent worldview. But it is in the individual interest of most of the individual GOP presidential candidates to pander to the base — to tell them what they want to hear (in this case, that they can just defund ObamaCare or amnesty — or whatever).

Jindal seems to have chosen the easy thing — not the courageous thing. But the really embarrassing part is that he’s not especially good at it.

I’m sure Peter Wehner gets this phenomenon, right?

Matt K. Lewis