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The best hits from Scott Angelle, Democrat lieutenant governor of Louisiana, railing against the White House’s six month drilling moratorium:

“America is not yet ready to get all of its fuel from the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees.”

“This moratorium on drilling only accomplishes the loss of American jobs, the dependence of more oil from unfriendly nations, and makes America less competitive in this global economy.”

“Mr. President, I get the fact that you don’t like oil and gas companies, but this moratorium does not hurt the stock holders of BP or Exxon or Chevron, this moratorium is hurting the Cheramies and the Callais and the Dupuis and the Boudreauxs and the Thibodeauxs.”

This is getting out of hand, and fast. (Updated with better video.) As for Bobby Jindal, he had this to say:

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Pejman has already noted the latest jarring ABC News report of a ridiculous incident in the Gulf, where a federal authority — no one’s willing to own up to which one — countermanded Governor Jindal’s order that barges designed to suck oil from the ocean’s surface be deployed off the Louisiana coast. The day they sat unused, these barges could’ve sucked up nearly a hundred thousand gallons of oil, and no one seems to know why they couldn’t be deployed.

My friend Paul Cella sends along this Alexis de Tocqueville quote from Democracy in America which could serve as a description of the entire situation:

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

As I wrote the other day, “Cleaning up the Gulf doesn’t start with legislation or commissions or committee hearings — it starts with making decisions and being willing to live with the results. Drop the sandbags, send BP a bill, and if they don’t pay for it, we’ll get it out of them in court.”

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On Tuesday night, President Obama will speak to the country from the Oval Office for the first time in an effort to recover from his disastrous response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The president will try to push back against the perception among the American people that he and his administration don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to the spill—a perception that is particularly damaging because it happens to be true.

In this context, Obama’s recent declaration that he’s looking for an “ass to kick” was a revealing public relations gaffe. It was an expression of frustrated impotence and clumsy anger from a president without solutions—as if throwing a temper tantrum would put things right, or at least get people off his back. It was also a sign of desperation: Obama must find that “ass to kick” as soon as possible, and he knows it.

Inevitably, the next few months will bring a major crackdown from the White House and its allies on the energy industry and oil companies. When you don’t have any answers, the easiest thing to do is find another villain and shift the blame.

So what should the president have done differently? He should’ve been honest with the American people from the beginning, both about the risks involved and the lack of easy answers.

Initially, Obama treated the incident as the industrial equivalent of the cinematic Ark of the Covenant: he assured us that top men had been marshaled to the task. But these experts quickly proved divided, and not particularly competent, hurting the president’s credibility.

Then the president tried to show that he shared America’s frustration with the circumstance by behaving angrily on television. But what earthly good can come of the president following Spike Lee’s preferred approach and uncorking some ersatz agita? People at BP haven’t been dawdling aimlessly, in need of an Asskicker-in-Chief.

Every unbiased observer can agree that BP has made major mistakes, mistakes for which they must be held accountable. But fearful of bearing the blame for a mismanaged recovery effort, it was the White House that chose a half-measure partnership arrangement with the company. Partnering with a corporation while simultaneously making childish threats and launching less-childish Justice Department investigations is never a smart idea if the aim is quick results.

This type of inept PR-driven approach is typified by the decision to pursue dispersal of the oil—an approach approved by the Environmental Protection Agency over the objections of Louisiana officials—which creates less of a surface level appearance of oil on the coastline but could result in far more damage below the surface, destroying the biological life cycle with massive and far-reaching effects.

If we were led by individuals more interested in operational solutions than public relations, partnership with local officials and first responders could’ve been handled in a much more effective manner, tasking missions quickly for results which could’ve saved the taxpayers millions and protected the shores of Louisiana.

In the wake of any disaster, leaders have a short amount of time to create a trust bond with the people and cement their problem-solving role: you must be honest, you must be on the ground, and you must be in charge. Drawing the wrong lesson from the Katrina debacle, Obama tried to convey an impression that minimized fears, asserting that everything was under control from the first moment.

Yet this situation is a total disaster, with open-ended potential for ecological and economic damage. And when the president claims that top men were on the case before heading out for a round of golf, leaving Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel to play with water pistols as the oil continues to gush, it’s natural for Americans to worry: could this be worse than he’s letting on?

During the 2008 campaign, the mainstream press described the young Senator from Illinois as a cool, unflappable professional, selling the idea of “no drama Obama” to the country. Americans want the president to be a competent professional and stable leader, not a detached academic or a font of grandstanding bluster.

Instead, we have a president who lacks the core attributes of a battlefield commander: confidence, decisiveness, boldness, and honesty. By not acknowledging the danger in the BP situation, Obama opened a major trust gap with the American people. Where Bush’s failure on Katrina was a nicked artery, Obama is now experiencing death by a thousand cuts.

It’s hard to imagine a worse outcome for Obama. His whole project as president is to convince Americans that they should learn to trust government with a much larger role in society. This case just got a lot harder for him to make.

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Same as the old boss:

The president teed off at the Andrews Air Force Base course with three other people, according to a pool report, but only one could be identified: White House trip director Marvin Nicholson.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana:

“We can fight this battle fifteen miles off our coasts,” belted Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, in a furious and desperate press conference held on the docks this afternoon in Venice, hub for the Deepwater response, “or we can be cleaning oil out of our fragile marshes for months or years.” …

Jindal fired off a list of complaints with those handling the spill and energetically proposed solutions, continuously castigating BP, the Coast Guard and the Army Corp of Engineers. Communities have requested boom and none has come, or it has arrived after oil has already slicked their beaches, or boom has been available but boats intended to lay it have been idled by BP. Over the weekend in Grand Isle, a summery barrier island community that got doused with oil starting Friday, the mayor took matters into his own hands, commandeering a fleet of fishing vessels under BP contract to lay boom around sensitive marshes.

Via PolitiPage.

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Leon Wolf:

There are three possible explanations for this, none of which end with Sarah Palin in the White House.

The first is that Sarah Palin is really and truly sick of politics and has decided to hang up her spurs. It is disappointing to those of us who have stood by her, but it certainly isn’t a poor reflection on her personally. Not everyone is cut from the material that allows them to stand in front of the media glare that comes from running for national office, especially when the person in question is a Republican and their family comes into the crosshairs.

The second is that she has decided to focus immediately on running for President in 2012. This suggestion is not a serious one: any person with a whit of sense knows that resigning without even a full term completed takes her completely out of the equation. If she cannot finish a single term, or handle her national travel while finishing out her term, how can she combat the full force of the Obama machine? Only the most foolhardy or clueless would consider this the path that Palin is taking; it is thus no surprise to find Chris Cilizza peddling it as a viable theory. If it is true, it demonstrates that she lacks the political judgment to run a national campaign in any case.

The third is that there is another shoe that has yet to drop, whether scandal, undisclosed health or personal issue, or other. It is probably pointless to speculate on these matters until they become known: if another shoe is set to drop, then drop it will, and we should expect it soon. The longer time goes past without word of it, the less likely it is that it exists.

Christopher Badeaux:

The takeaway from Sarah Palin’s resignation today is that if you’re a Republican (especially but not only a woman) with children under the age of 18, don’t bother.

Seriously, what’s the point? John Roberts’s kids became a talking point, and he was nominated to an appointed office. Sarah Palin’s freaking maternal records became a subject of debate — what reporter would come up to a man, say, like her husband, and say to his face, “Isn’t it true that child isn’t yours?” No jury outside the Bay Area would find him guilty or liable for literally dragging the little worm’s face across fifteen feet of concrete. Barry Obama’s medical records release was a one-page note from his doctor — “All’s Well! Thanks for asking!” — and we’re talking about the heartbeat keeping Joe Freaking Biden from the Oval Office.

Anyone remember all that talk about Sasha and Malia’s likelihood of teenage sex based on race, age, and economic strata? How about Al Gore’s kids? John Edwards’s? Can you remotely imagine any mainstream news reporter even giving air or print time to the theory that Chelsea Clinton had had multiple abortions, regardless of the truth? Can you imagine any of those politicians’ children, if born with Down Syndrome or autism or anything remotely equivalent, being a hate object and being called a political prop?

Had I the talent, looks, charm, and ambition to run for political office (which I do not), I’d have learned over the last year not to do so. My children and my wife mean too much to me. My opponent’s teenaged daughters could be running a lesbian brothel and there wouldn’t be a peep; my daughter could be caught kissing a boy and there’d be rumors he’d knocked her up and I forced her to get an abortion, and those rumors would get mainstream press play.

This isn’t even to get into the insanity of a State ethics system that allows complainants to make repeat, baseless charges against an official, incur no costs, and watch as the official runs up hundreds of thousands in legal bills for which she is personally liable. This is nauseating, stupid, and proof that we’ve crossed some line: Republics work. Things like this are why pure democracies don’t.

Pejman Yousefzadeh:

If Palin has decided she doesn’t want her family to be in the crosshairs, and is therefore getting out of politics, I understand. If she thinks that she is going to become President, or achieve some higher office as a consequence of this move, she has another think coming. If the Left continues to believe that she will try to be a political figure, they will continue to launch ethics investigations, and ex-governors can’t defend themselves as well as governors can. In any event, the Left will now be encouraged to try the same tactics on the next up-and-coming Republican star, or perceived one.

Benjamin Kerstein

I may be naive, but it seems like it could work for her if she’s planning a presidential run. It seems to me that Sarah Palin is the only possible candidate the Republicans have who shares an essential quality with Obama: she gets the conservative base excited and riled up to a near-religious degree. That’s an intangible quality, and you either have it or you don’t. I don’t think the Republicans can even hope to beat Obama if they can’t find a candidate with that kind of charisma. So, for Palin, the real question should be, will this work for the base? I think it will. They’ll see her as a small town woman viciously wronged by the political and media elite, including those in her own party. I think this will arouse even more sympathy for her and increase her appeal. Whether this is good for the Republican Party on a national level, however, is something else entirely.

Ben Domenech

Sarah Palin is the most divisive political figure in America. She has been for the past year. Just the other day — before we knew of her impending resignation announcement — a few friends and I discussed some points made by Jim Geraghty on a particularly loathsome series of articles and statements by major media and online figures with pretenses of rationality.

For my part, I argued that there’s really little difference between the reaction to Palin and the reaction to other good-looking conservative women — as exemplified by the recent Playboy scandal and the litany of examples provided by the online left over the past few years. But perhaps what is different, in Palin’s case, is the assistance of the mainstream media. And in this case, I don’t blame them as much as some do. Palin is great for magazines. She sells. She’s sexy, controversial, and has plenty of local enemies to give quotes. A third of America loves her to death and a third wishes she would die in a fire. That’s gold, Jerry.

I confess, I don’t understand the motivations of some of this hatred. Palin is by all accounts a fairly normal politician; if anything, it’s hard to see the ideological differences between her and, let’s say, Mike Huckabee, who charms many on the left (heck, even Stewart and Colbert). This makes me think it’s a lot more about style than substance, about who she’s decided to be, about her accent, and about that wink. It’s all just a matter of personal reaction, exaggerated by personal experience — I have a friend who also decided to give birth to a child with Down Syndrome, and so the accusations that Trig Palin is nothing more than a political prop of his mother is the sort of thing that make my skin crawl, even when they come from individuals known far and wide for their ability to spew inhuman excrement from their keyboards. Maybe others don’t have this experience, but hypothetically, if Michelle Obama had been confronted with the same situation and made the same choice Palin did, my admiration for her would be astronomically higher, and I don’t hesitate to say that questions about her pregnancy would be considered unacceptable across the pro-life right. But that’s beside the point.

The divisiveness Palin represents could be a reason to think she’s not done with politics, or as Erick Erickson rightly draws the distinction, only done with electoral politics. She’s on the cusp of a massive book tour and her popularity among Republicans remains very high:

Palin’s biggest strength is her enduring popularity among the Republican base. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed that while she remains divisive among the general public, some 84% of white evangelical Republicans, and 80% of conservative Republicans, give her high marks.

But as Jonah Goldberg notes, and Ace echoes, this is just not a decision that will bolster her support among these corners. With all the freedom it grants to work politically in the lower 48 and escape the multiple frivolous complaints lodged against her in Alaska, that freedom comes with a major penalty: she now legitimately will lose any political experience arguments against any other potential primary candidate in 2012, and certainly against President Obama. It is just not conceivable to view her as a national candidate for the presidency matched up against others in the race.

Resigning at the end of her term in 2010 — I could see that. She’d have as much elected experience as Romney, and the race for the presidency takes two years anyway. But now? I think the idle chatter about an impending scandal is just that — she’s been so heavily monitored over the last year, I think everything that’s there has already been turned over. If it is a scandal, I’m more likely to believe it’s something involving one of her children rather than Palin herself. She withstood the attacks, the vile innuendo, the Photoshops, and the pornos (yes, pornos, multiple) for the last 10 months, after all. I doubt the problem is a lack of personal toughness from the self-described “mama grizzly.”

Personally, I now think she’s really had enough. She has, in the past, always spoken of preferring motherhood to politics. Regardless of Mark Halperin’s smart points to the contrary, I believe that’s the path she’s taking. She’ll raise a ton of money for like-minded Republicans on the circuit, her book will sell well, she’ll continue to inspire affection from devoted fans and anger from her enemies, and Andrew Sullivan almost certainly won’t stop writing about Trig whenever she pops up to do an interview. But this is not 1962, and she is not Richard Milhous Nixon. Absent another successful run for office down the road, I can see no situation where Palin is ever in the serious conversation for the presidency.

So the time came, and we went to the place where the men were building a wall to stop the water. The tilted blades of the Black Hawk helicopter made a heavy whut-whut sound as they arced through the air above us – ferocious, unrelenting, yet somehow comforting to the ear. Beneath us, the lazy curves of the Mississippi River stretched and sighed in the afternoon sun, the roiling water full of life and memory. As the rotor turned, I remembered the drawl of the smiling Natchez lawyer who told me when I was younger that this River carried in itself the story of America – which, to my Jackson-born ears, sounded like a loftier way of saying that this carved-out scar of flowing water was big, it was unstoppable, and without it, none of us would be. Or if we were, we would not be children of the American South, taught tales from the crib of the tragic accidents of history – brought up with the knowledge that existence is a fragile, fate-filled thing.

The wall was in Pointe Coupee Parish, and the men building it were soldiers from the 225th Engineering Brigade. It was an amazing site from the sky, following the line of the Potato Levee along the Atchafalaya River Basin, an unbroken line of 4 foot by 4 foot sacks glinting white in the sunlight. We set down in the mud and walked to where they were sealing a final hole, mashing 3,000 pounds of dirt into the stretched sacks, donated by a local company – when filled, as strong as a bunker. Much better than the ones we used in ‘83, said one veteran who worked on saving the same swathe of land 25 years ago. When finished, it would stretch for more than two miles.

The farmers were sincere men, sunburned and smiling in their checked shirts. They saluted the National Guard members with the eagerness of young boys, and could not stop thanking anyone who was anyone. You would do that too, of course, if someone’s action and quick response was about to save your nearly 6,000 acres of wheat and soybeans. But what you wouldn’t be able to do, of course, was cook them a meal like these farmers did.

“What are you boys eating?” one of the farmer’s wives had asked on the first day.

“MREs, ma’am.”

“Not in South Louisiana you’re not,” the farmers said. So that night the men feasted on crawfish, étouffée, fried catfish and homemade bread. And then they went back to building the wall.

Only a few days earlier, the farmers had sent a group to talk to Louisiana’s new governor, Bobby Jindal, pleading for help. They hadn’t known what to expect. But they never expected this.

“I was very surprised they sent out the National Guard,” farmer Marty Graham told a local reporter. He and the other men had been working furiously with their wives and children, using makeshift sandbags, with little hope of finishing by the time the water crested. But by Monday, the help came. And so the big wide-shouldered Louisiana farmers met the slim governor, youngest in the nation, as they would a conquering hero.

Out of earshot of the soldiers, I asked one of the farmers what he thought of Governor Jindal. He squinted at me, as if surprised I didn’t know his answer already, then smiled. He answered seriously:

“He’s the man.”

We flew back toward the capitol building and the warring politicians inside, a building where the old order is clashing with more than 60 new faces in the legislature, and where the policy battle to determine Louisiana’s future is only beginning.

The water is high. But here, as it is throughout the state, Jindal’s triune message is one that speaks to the stakes at hand, and his commitment to win. The wall can hold. It must hold. It will hold.

Jindal’s team will make sure it does. The policy staff would be a crack outfit for a President of the United States, and they need to be to navigate the odd peculiarities of Louisiana law – trust me, it’s charming until you actually have to wrestle with it. The Cabinet is filled with amazingly litany of capable managers and policy innovators. Whip-smart Commissioner of Administration Angèle Davis has a golden touch – she could make the Oakland Raiders a contender. Labor Secretary Tim Barfield is the former president of The Shaw Group. Secretary of Health and Hospitals Alan Levine, who worked for years in Florida for Gov. Jeb Bush and in the private sector, is maybe the only person in America who knows more about health policy than Jindal himself.

Mark Cooper, who heads up the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, is perhaps the best example of the kind of amazing pull Jindal has: an LSU grad who left the state (like so many other bright young men and women) and who most recently ran the Los Angeles County Fire Department, managing a billion dollar budget, contacted Jindal’s transition team after reading a Wall Street Journal article titled “Bayou Bobby: A new governor offers hope for disaffected Louisiana expats.” Like so many others, he’ll tell you he came back to help his state, recognizing the unique opportunity for renewal and change.

That change won’t come easily, despite Jindal’s early policy successes. His special sessions were stunning achievements, yes, and speak to the momentum he carries with him. Jindal’s ethics reforms have made fundamental changes already in the way the legislature does business, and the tax policies have already made Louisiana a model for how state government should lift restrictions and let the free market work. But his plan to respond to New Orleans’ educational crisis and his policy goals for the coming year will likely make him public enemy number one for the teacher unions, organizations for whom competition and inner city scholarships are viewed as threats. The next wins will be harder fought, and there should be blood on the floor when it’s all done.

There’s no question that the Baton Rouge media gaggle is loaded for bear. Confused about how to cover a governor who is so authentic, so free of scandal, and so open about his philosophy of government and policy views, they’re determined to give him as short a grace period as possible. And when the next storm comes – and it is not a question of if, it is a question of when – no one should trust that the stories they and national journalists write about the next storm will be fair or balanced. If they see any opportunity to stop a rising star, the face of a new brand of conservative, someone who has accomplished more meaningful reform in a few weeks in the governor’s mansion than Barack Obama has accomplished in his entire career, there’s no doubt they will try.

So many governors in Louisiana history have started out strong, and yet so few have been reelected. They will do their best to stack the odds against him, because that is what they do.

Yet if those close to Jindal are cognizant of that, it quite honestly isn’t part of his focus. His love for his job is evident; you can end all that Veep talk folks, ain’t gonna happen. His state is the only thing on his mind. Well, maybe one or two other things – the future of conservatism, for one.

The simple measure of the movement, for Jindal, as he repeats in his soft-spoken but absolutely serious voice, is whether as conservatives, we actually have confidence in our ideas – confidence enough to put them to the test.

When crises arise, so often the modern Beltway conservative response is to run from our principles – to offer a plan that’s just about throwing taxpayer money at a problem or a poorly run agency, and just do it slightly cheaper than the liberals do. It’s the ideology of the limp wrist: a response to challenge that throws fiscal responsibility out of the window; that says there is no point where policy compromise is worse than principled defeat; that says giving parents the freedom to determine where their child goes to school is a good idea in theory, but let’s not rock the boat on this one.

If the conservative movement that won the Cold War, passed welfare reform, and revitalized the American economy in the 20th Century is going to serve this country well in the 21st, they must learn to have the courage to do what’s right. We advocate for policy change not just because it’s principled, but we believe that it works better for the American people – that most conservative solutions fundamentally understand human nature in a way that liberal ones do not. And that when we are confronted by a candidate like Obama, whose sheen of HopeChange disguises a candidate who has no daylight on policy between himself and Ted Kennedy, we can explain why those policy differences matter.

Jindal himself does not need to learn the definition of principled leadership. The skill comes naturally to him. He knows he is building a great thing, but his perfectionist spirit means he is not yet mindful of the greatness of this accomplishment.

But even if he doesn’t, the families of Louisiana already understand – the wind has changed. They can feel it, a larger change than any one piece of legislation or one slate of policy fixes could achieve. This is something more fundamental. For once, the word “possibility” is said with real optimism – and by people who once, unlike the well-heeled crowds of suburbanites at YesWeCan rallies, had no hope at all for the future.

The odds are still poor – the waters are high, yes – but the wall will hold this time. They have a Governor who will be sure of it.

As a young LSU grad told me as we looked out over the Mississippi, the ripples glistening in the amber light of sunset: “If anyone can do it, he can.”

The water is high. But the new Louisiana is coming. Bobby Jindal is building it.

crossposted at redstate. photos from here.

The first time I saw Bobby Jindal, he left Jack Welch, John Sweeney, and a roomful of corporate bigshots, union leaders, and people who generally like to hear themselves talk absolutely dumbfounded.

It wasn’t the first time he’d done this sort of thing, and certainly not the last.

Read on.

It was 2003, and President Bush’s Medicare plan was coming to Capitol Hill. As every cabinet secretary does in these situations, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson was tasked with marketing the legislative policy to the people who matter—Committee Chairmen, union heads, and a trail of Congresspeople were met for one-on-one sessions, where Tommy would use his trademark aw-shucks Wisconsin glad-handing tactics to try and win their vote.

But on an issue as big as Medicare, and with the controversial Prescription Drug Benefit the president was proposing, there was a need for something bigger than the normal Hill activity. So the heads of GE, the AFL-CIO, and a dozen other captains of industry and labor met in a small back room of the Hay-Adams hotel, across Lafayette Park from the White House, to share their thoughts on the legislation.

Standing against the burgundy wall behind Thompson’s ornate chair, I watched as he went into his traditional spiel in favor of the measure. “This is a first step toward more flexibility, toward more accountability. This is about bringing common sense into a confused and disorganized system. I’ll listen to what you have to say and take it back to the President.” And so on.

Thompson always seemed to me to be a good and kindhearted Midwestern fellow. But like many former governors who were once the unchallenged kings of their state, he would often make the mistake of assuming that the same tactics that worked back home could work here. Where before tough political divisions could be mended in the box at a Packers game, or over a round of brews, or after a cross-county Harley ride, the political creatures who inhabit Washington have no taste for such things. They want money, and power, and credit, and sometimes all of the above. And if they can’t have it, they don’t believe you should, either.

In this meeting, Thompson had walked into a vituperative buzzsaw in the person of Leo Gerard, head of the United Steelworkers. Stout, vulgar, and mustachioed, Gerard was not interested in debate or discussion, but in browbeating Thompson and the business leaders around the table into submission. His policy views were bluntly communist. With a stack of papers at his side, Gerard would cite an odd statistic, use it as the basis for why the American health care system should be more like Sweden’s, then doodle on his notepad while others responded.

The meeting fell apart within fifteen minutes. Thompson just didn’t know how to handle this creature. He quickly found there was no give and take on health care with Gerard—even moving leftward in small areas would never satisfy the union leader. And where Thompson would try to respond with alternate statistics or his knowledge of the situation, Gerard would fall back on anecdotes about workers bleeding in the streets while fat cats got the best health care that money could buy.

Bobby Jindal, at that time a senior policy advisor at HHS, arrived late to the meeting, cracking the door and slipping through. He is a slim and quiet man, with an easygoing smile—but always with the underlying intensity of those truly dedicated to the tasks in front of them. I knew who he was, but had never seen him in person before.

After a few minutes of watching Jack Welch roll his eyes as Gerard launched into another tirade on the virtues of socialist health care, he stepped toward the table.

“Mister Secretary, if I may interject?” he asked. Relieved for the possibility of some help, Thompson nodded assent.

Off the top of his head, Jindal started going down the list. He snapped Gerard’s smaller concerns like dry twigs, citing statistics and anecdotes as if they were memorized specifically for this moment. The larger socialist arguments he hacked into little bits—this won’t work, here’s why it won’t work, and here’s three places where they tried it and it didn’t. He was polite, he was intelligent, and he was passionate. He was ruthless.

Gerard sat, silent and sullen. He tried to respond at one point, but got tied up in knots. He shuffled his papers. He took a sip of water. And he was quiet. Everyone was.

In five minutes, Bobby Jindal made the case for free market solutions, for individual liberty, and for health care that caters to what people need, not what unions want. He did what none of the other men in the room were capable of doing. And it seemed as if it was as easy for him as breathing.

There are precious few people in America who, given the choice between a cushy Washington career and the task of governing the ungovernable, would choose the path Bobby Jindal has.

But that’s who Jindal is. It’s who he always has been.

Bobby Jindal was born in Baton Rouge in 1971. His parents were in grad school there, recent immigrants from the Punjab in northern India. He was raised Hindu, but converted to Roman Catholicism in his teens. He went to Louisiana public schools, then Brown University, where he was an honors student in biology and public policy. A Rhodes Scholar, he was admitted to the medical and law schools of both Harvard and Yale—but chose Oxford instead.

It was 1994. He was 23 years old. The whole bright world of Europe was open before him. He had a prestigious consulting job waiting in D.C. But Bobby Jindal was looking back toward home.

Republican Gov. Mike Foster, Jr. the rambunctious chief executive of the state at the time, took notice of Jindal. And before he turned 25, the young policy mind was appointed Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals. They needed him, this kid, to fix the Louisiana health care system—a wreck of a system, facing the worst crisis of mismanagement, fraud, and abuse in its history.

He had to be on the job immediately—so he gave away his furniture, packed up his clothes, and hopped on a plane bound for home. The appointment was “a bit unorthodox,” and that was just in the words of the man who made it.

“Everybody that has met him agrees with me. He is a walking computer...for some reason, his mind is locked in on the medical field,” Foster told the Baton Rouge Rotary Club. “And he is also the kind of guy you can go out and drink a beer with. He’s a nice guy. This is a guy that will, if you sit down with him, give you more confidence that he's got a handle on it and is going to stop solving things with crisis maintenance.”

“I've got as much confidence in Bobby Jindal as any man I’ve ever met.”

“Whiz Kid Takes the Reins,” the headlines said.

Jindal likes to tell the story now of how when he went out on dates, he’d just tell girls that he was “a secretary.” Nobody would believe him if he said what his real job was—or worse, he’d seem like he was bragging. In 1997, he married Supriya Jolly, who was apparently impressed enough by him despite his lowly title.

From 1998 to 1999, Jindal headed up the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, the first significant push for reform of the national health care system. The seventeen-member panel was chaired by then-Senator John Breaux, the Louisiana Democrat who, at the time of this article, is reportedly considering returning to Louisiana to run against Bobby in what has all the marks of an epic southern political showdown. Breaux likely won’t do it, though—the latest polls show that the long-serving Senator, who’s been working as a lobbyist in D.C. for several years, would trail the younger Jindal by nearly ten points.

In 1999, Jindal moved homeward again to become the youngest-ever President of the University of Louisiana System. And in 2001, the new President Bush snatched him up, bringing him in to be the idea man at HHS.

It was the kind of career arc that some men take decades to achieve. The next move, in the typical Washington fashion, is to a high-priced private sector job—the corner office, the nice bonus, the big house in walking distance of Georgetown. But Bobby Jindal came back home.

In 2003, he took on Katherine Blanco, the Democrat Lieutenant Governor, to replace the retiring Gov. Foster. After navigating the messy but-oh-so-Louisiana jungle primary, Jindal took first place with 33 percent of the vote. The Times-Picayune endorsed him, as did several Democrats, despite the fact that he was 100% pro-life. No negative campaigner, Jindal stressed his role as a problem solver, and the need to fix the many difficulties plaguing his home state: “I am not a politician, I’m a problem-solver, and Louisiana needs a problem-solver,” he said in his quiet southern accent.

And many of the people listened. But not enough.

On election day, Jindal won a plethora of districts, including Blanco’s home of Lafayette. But in the normally conservative parishes of northern Louisiana, he lost by slim margins. In the last days of the campaign, ads had run in many of these districts that used darkened photos of Jindal and ominous intonations. Some voters just made the choice by color, not by ideas—and Blanco won with 52 percent of the vote.

The private sector called again. Bobby was too smart to waste his time in this effort—come back to Washington, they said, and they said it with bags of money.

Yet a few weeks after the devastating loss, Jindal was on TV again, announcing that he was running for the open seat vacated by Rep. David Vitter, who was vying to replace the outgoing Sen. Breaux. This time, in a safe Republican district, the support was on his side. He won handily, with 78% of the vote.

In Congress, he was elected Freshman Class President. He got several good committee postings. He joined the conservative Republican Study Committee. He started to get used to the idea of being a legislator.

Then, in August of 2005, the skies ripped open. And nothing would be the same again.

You don’t see how bad some governments are run until the moment when things are at their most dire and people face their greatest moment of need.

At that point of despair, a choice is made: either the cops form lines to rush the burning towers, or they grab a shopping cart and start looking for what they can take.

Bobby Jindal doesn’t tell a lot of stories about what he did during Katrina. Seeing the devastation firsthand does that to you. You have to hear it from the people around him, the people who saw what he did.

A few days after the storm, there was a meeting of the Louisiana principals. Blanco was there, FEMA’s soon-to-be-infamous Michael Brown, a handful of Congressmen, and every local political staffer worth shaking a stick at, and some not even worth that. It was supposed to start at Noon. At 12:30, it still hadn’t. People were milling around, chatting, giving quotes to reporters.

Jindal surveyed the room for a few minutes. Then he saw Blanco and the others pause to look at a television in the corner—it was footage from another press conference they’d had the previous day, broadcasting on CNN. The politicians all stood around, watching themselves on the screen.

Jindal turned to his chief of staff, and said, “Let’s go.”

They climbed into a Ford Excursion and took off looking for what they could do to help. They started with Harry Lee, the infamous Sheriff of Jefferson Parish.

Lee is a typical Louisiana political figure. Born in the backroom of a Chinese laundry in New Orleans, Lee was first elected sheriff in 1979. He’s been there ever since. Popular, controversial, but effective, Lee keeps crime rates consistently low in his parish—despite the fact that his neighbors in Orleans enjoy one of the highest crime rates in America.

During Katrina, Lee commandeered local Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores, allowing them to open in spite of FEMA’s request that they remain closed. When the Feds got angry, Lee responded that anyone who tried to close either store would be arrested by deputies. And when the Times-Picayune asked Lee about the 40 deputies who didn’t show up for work after the storm, Lee said he’d told the one officer who’d tried to return late not to waste his time: “As far as I’m concerned, [he] will never get a job in law enforcement again.”

Jindal and his staff found Lee exactly where they expected him to be: eating in a local diner, his unofficial office, powered by generators. Jindal asked him what he and his officers needed. Lee said he needed nothing, of course—but he had a helicopter to spare. Why not put it to use? So Bobby climbed in and headed to the St. Bernard parish, where Sheriff Jack Stephens gave them a list of what he needed.

1. Trucks
2. Medical Supplies
3. Water
4. Guns
5. Ammo

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jindal said. Lee took care of the numbers 4 and 5—the congressman got the rest.

Before the storm, Michael Brown and the folks at FEMA had told Jindal that they had “resources in place” to respond to the storm, organized and ready to move in with water, food, and clothing in the event the levees broke (though no one really considered such a possibility). Now, these resources were nowhere to be found. Calls to FEMA on the Sat-phone produced nothing at first, followed by lousy excuses.

“Where are the trucks? Where are the medical supplies? Where’s the food?” Jindal and his staff asked.

“Well, we don’t think it’s safe enough to send them in,” was the reply.

An idea: why don’t they give the food, the supplies, everything, to the National Guard. After all, they have guns. If crazed looters try to take the goods, the Guard can, you know, shoot them.

Such an action isn’t authorized here, FEMA responded. The supplies sat where they were for days.

Jindal’s office had set up a hotline number, with the number broadcast over the radio airwaves, for anyone who needed help to call. The calls ranged the full gamut, from the expected to the shocking—from no power, to missing children, to medical supplies needed, to “I’m stuck in my attic with a cell phone and a radio. Please come and save me.”

They had a helicopter pilot call in. He had his helicopter, gassed up and ready to go. But he wanted authorization to go in and save people.

Jindal’s staff called FEMA—they said it was a military issue. They called the Marines—they said it was an issue for the Department of Transportation. They called the DOT—nobody knew who to ask.

Jindal called the helicopter pilot back. “Go in.”

“You got me authorization?” the pilot asked.

“Yeah, I’m giving you your authorization right now.”

A local mayor told Jindal a story after the fact that in retrospect seems like a good symbol for the disconnect between D.C. and Louisiana. After the storm, he’d called FEMA in search of help. They were flooded. They had no power. Can you send someone?

“I’m not authorized to do that, I’ll need to ask my supervisor.”

Thirty minutes on hold.

“Yeah, he’s not able to approve that right now,” the FEMA bureaucrat said. “Could you maybe email the details? I can pass it along then.”

The mayor informed FEMA that no, without electricity, they couldn’t email him. FEMA put them on hold, searching for the answer to this unexpected situation.

Another few minutes. Then they came back on.

“Yeah, see, that’s our protocol here. So if you could find someone to email the details, and then maybe put that last part in the email too? That’d be great.”

FEMA was useless. The governor was looking for someone to blame. Time to solve some problems. Time to use that rolodex.

Jindal and his staff started calling like mad, becoming a de facto volunteer and donation coordinator for the corporate, community, and faith-based entities eager to help. We need a truck with clean water—let’s talk to the beer companies, the soda makers. We need medical supplies—I know a guy with the pharmaceutical companies, they’ll donate something. We need people in boats—let’s talk to the megachurches. They’ve got volunteers up north, but no way to get them here—fine, let’s call down the list to everyone who owns a plane or a helicopter.

One can’t really tell the impact one congressman and his staff had on the recovery from a storm like Katrina. There’s no tangible way to measure it. In simple legislative terms, Jindal did a handful of key things—putting together the relief plan, co-sponsoring the bill to prevent authorities from grabbing guns from legally-authorized owners, pleading for competence in managing the aid to the people of his state.

We can’t measure it. But the people of Louisiana know what he did.

After being reelected by a wide margin, in January of 2007 Jindal announced that he would return home to run for governor again. Even though the Republican leadership wanted him to take on vulnerable Senator Mary Landrieu, Jindal knew his state, his devastated home, needed him now more than ever.

The polls weren’t even close. In March, faced with a prospect of an election that would uncover the true breadth of her incompetence and mistakes, Gov. Blanco announced that she would not run for reelection. There are just too many stories, and too much truth to be told about the choices she made and didn’t make when people’s lives were on the line.

The remnants of the Louisiana Democratic machine are scrambling to fill her spot—and already, some are admitting publicly that their only hope is to play the race card. Democrat Rep. Charles Melancon mused to reporters that “a white, centrist Democrat can beat Jindal.”

It remains to be seen who they’ll choose. In early polling, Jindal still leads all potential candidates. But Louisiana has a history of difficult, controversial, and crooked elections, and there’s no reason to think this will be any different.

What is different is Jindal. He’s more earnest now, more than just a policy wonk dealing with charts and figures. He’s more dedicated to the ideals he cherishes, because he knows what they mean for his state. He’s older, but it’s not just the years—Katrina aged him. He understands the importance of this race for his home state, for his neighbors, for his family.

In the fall of 2006, Jindal’s wife was pregnant with her third child. In the middle of the night, in their home in Kenner, Louisiana, she awoke to the pain of contractions, days before she was expected to deliver. They called the hospital, and got ready to leave—but it quickly became obvious that this child was coming out, and it was coming out right now.

At 3:25 AM, before the paramedics could arrive, the congressmen delivered his third child, a son named Slade Ryan Jindal, into the world.

“[My wife] told me, ‘Make sure to get everything out of his mouth.’ I said, ‘I don't think there is any obstruction. He’s screaming,’” Jindal told the Times-Picayune.

“She asked me if there were 10 fingers and toes. I told her there were. She asked if it was a boy or a girl. I told her it was a boy…It was all so quick. It was over in 30 minutes,” he said. He put the baby in his wife’s arms, and tied off the umbilical cord with a shoelace.

“You don’t have time to think about calling anyone for help. It’s your wife and son. You just do what you have to do.”

This fall, Louisiana can choose the old ways of doing things, the corrupt ways, the status quo. They can fall back. Or they can move forward under the leadership of the brilliant young policy wonk who chose his home over comfort and financial success. They can take this opportunity to walk in a better path, a path toward solving their problems, fixing the crushed houses and streets, and do what they have to do to make this broken state new again.

The choice is theirs to make.

(Originally posted by Ben Domenech at Redstate)