Bobby Jindal Essay

Bobby Jindal, only the second Indian American to serve in the U.S. Congress, has a resume as impressive as some politicians in their 60s or 70s. Yet Jindal was only 33 when he became a congressman. By then, he had already run for governor of Louisiana and almost won, directed a system of universities in Louisiana, a huge department of state government, and a national commission made up mostly of U.S. senators and congress people, and worked as an aide to President George W. Bush. Admirers attribute his success to his intelligence and a confidence that has converted many skeptics. (http://www.jindal.house.gov)

Jindal was born in 1971 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to parents who had just moved there from India to attend graduate school. They gave him the name Piyush, but when he was four, he told them he wanted to be called Bobby, after Bobby Brady in the television show The Brady Bunch. Though his parents are Hindu, Jindal converted to Christianity in high school. He attended Brown University, and then went to England as a Rhodes Scholar for graduate work at Oxford University. He also worked as an intern for U.S. Rep. Jim McCrery and spent a year and a half with the consulting firm McKinsey and Co. (http://www.bobbyjindal.com)

In 1996, at age 24, the new governor of Louisiana named Jindal the director of the state health and hospitals department. He got the job by calling McCrery. At first, McCrery asked if he would consider the assistant secretary position, but Jindal said “no.” However, after Mike Foster was elected governor, Jindal called again to ask McCrery to recommend him. Jindal was one of six people interviewed. As Foster admitted to the press, he was not looking forward to the interview, but within a half hour, Jindal had convinced him he was the best person for the job. (Washington Post; 1998)

State legislators thought he would be totally ineffective. The job seemed impossible for anyone. The department, which took up 40 percent of the state budget, was running a deficit of $400 million. The federal government was investigating its administration of federal Medicaid funds. But within three years, Jindal had turned the department around, exposed millions of dollars of waste and fraud, and eliminated its massive deficit. (Wall Street Journal; 1998)

Jindal discovered that the state paid lump sums to hospitals at the beginning of a year based on how many Medicaid patients they estimated they would treat, but the state was rarely checking to see if they really treated that number. He discovered clinics that employed a dozen people but had no patients, even a clinic that bused in schoolchildren to receive candy instead of care. (Washington Post; 1998)

Meanwhile, Jindal earned a reputation for honesty and frugality by buying a car instead of accepting a government vehicle, by talking in simple terms about politics in front of the legislature, and even, when he got married to Supriya Jolly, he asked ethics officials how he should handle wedding presents from people he might regulate, then including that advice in his wedding invitations. (Esquire; 2003)

After his success with the health and hospitals department, Jindal returned to Washington in 1998 to be the executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. The committee was mostly made up of senators, congressmen, health care experts, and others decades older than him. While two senators acted as the commission's chairmen, Jindal was responsible for its day to day operations. Ever since then, Jindal has continued to bounce back and forth between Louisiana and Washington. After running the Medicare commission, in 1999 Jindal was named president of the University of Louisiana system, which includes eight schools and 80, 000 students. He held that job for two years. After George W. Bush became president, Jindal became an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which made him a senior health policy advisor to the president. (Washington Post; 2003)

After that series of dazzling career moves, Jindal decided to add one more. In 2003, he ran for governor of Louisiana. He was not expected to do well in a state where white supremacist David Duke had been the Republican nominee for governor 12 years earlier. But Foster, the departing governor, endorsed him, and his intelligence, reputation for integrity, earnestness, religiosity and conservatism impressed voters. Jindal's radio ads attacked abortion, gun control, and gay marriage while stressing his Catholicism. Meanwhile, on television, he pitched himself to moderates as a problem-solver. In speeches, he would impress audiences by rattling off several detailed plans on a variety of issues. He promised tax cuts to generate jobs and to restore Louisiana’s former name as capital of the south. (New York Times; 2004)

Though Jindal led in many polls before the election, Blanco beat him 52 to 48 percent. Within months of the election, Jindal announced that he would run for Congress, hoping to claim a seat that would open up thanks to the departure of a Republican congressman. Jindal fit the conservative bent of the district, which includes suburbs of New Orleans, including his home, Kenner, as well as a portion of New Orleans itself and rural areas separated from greater New Orleans. Jindal won the general election with 78 percent of the vote, making him the second Indian-American congressperson ever. Though he was only 33 when elected, the 23 freshman Republicans in Congress named Jindal their class president, and the House leadership named him an assistant whip. (New York Times; 2004)

Reporters found Jindal eager to talk about health care reform, even though congressional leadership did not name him to a health care committee. With health care costs and the number of uninsured people rising, Jindal insisted that Republicans needed a positive vision of health care reform. Of course, his status as the only Indian-American congressman got him attention, too. News services in India often carried news about him. In July of 2005, Jindal and his wife were invited to a White House dinner with the prime minister of India and was praised for his cause for health care reform. (AP Online; 2005)

On January 14, 2008, Jindal was elected the 55^th governor of Louisiana in a very close race and is now one of the Republican Party’s rising young stars. He is considered to the republican Barack Obama by many, the new fresh young face of the republican party, and the front runner for the republican party in the 2012 presidential elections, and hopefully, someday, the president of the United States of America. (AP Online; 2008)