“What happened to Bobby Jindal?” “Is Jindal the new Romney?” Jindal “gives up,” “retrenches” and “scraps” his latest income tax plan.
These are only tastes of the headlines in newspapers and websites across the country seeking to make sense of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s recent decision to pass the torch of income tax elimination on to the Louisiana legislature.
Jindal, who remarked at the opening of this year’s legislative session that he would not be discouraged by the lack of support, is wise not to pout about the lack of support for his move to replace income and corporate taxes with more expansive and expensive sales taxes. But the flop has led political pundits to sharply reconsider the governor’s national reputation as a rising star of the Republican Party by looking within Louisiana borders for answers as to why such an innovative — and starkly Republican — plan could not pass in the state that voted for his landslide victory in 2011.
While the interpretation of the move may vary among Louisiana lawmakers, headlines from within and outside of the state have cast Jindal in a light of being both deflated and unwanted in his home state.
“It’s a monumental thing for any politician to realize that what they’re trying to promote the public isn’t behind yet,” Republican John Alario, president of the State Senate, told The New York Times.
This may be as lightly as one could phrase the legislative handoff that took place Monday, but it hearkens to unfavorable trends in state support referenced by The New York Times and reported by Southern Media Opinion & Research Inc. April 2: namely, that popularity among his constituents dropped from 51 percent in October to 38 percent in the spring 2013 survey.
As Jindal rides the publicity waves of his latest political adventures — such as calling out the “stupid” elements of the Republican Party and his private school voucher plan — this most recent concession has given the media new reason to inspect just how solid Jindal’s footing is in the race to 2016.
With the Washington Post referring to the income tax elimination as a “very public failure” and a New York Times blogger calling it “self-evidently injurious to Mr. Jindal’s chances of capturing the Republican presidential nomination,” Jindal may now be finding brown grass on both sides of the state border.
Perhaps the governor’s perfect posture redirected attention from his crumbling base, but as bold moves continuously turn into consistent defeats, the national media has taken notice that the man’s policies don’t look so good up close.
At least Jindal was able to realize before it was too late that his innovative taxation lacked representation, minimizing harm to his cause and planting a lingering hope in the state legislature to pass the bill for him.
As Politico reported, Jindal has not yet conceded defeat — but given the scathing headlines and skeptical eyes watching from blogs and mastheads around the country, he may as well have.
Clayton Crockett is a 21-year-old international studies senior from Lafayette.
