>> Now this is just brilliant stuff here: In 1921, Agnes Macphail became the first woman elected to the Canadian House of Commons. Not all of her colleagues welcomed her. One tried to embarrass her by asking, “Don’t you wish you were a man?” “No,” Macphail replied. “Don’t you?”

>> My own endorsement of John McCain aside, I do hope that his legal staff has worked up a solid response on the question of his status as a natural born citizen. Read the comments from Florida Law Prof Steven Willis in the thread for more.

So here we are, at the turn of the tide: one vote from winning the court; two-to-three good years from winning the largest stage of the war; the pressures of the Oval Office at their dramatic peak. A critical moment in our nation’s history, time for an individual with the strength and courage to do what the moment demands.

In 2008, I support John McCain.

“But…but…” my friends say incredulously, “But John McCain is crazy!”

“Perhaps,” I answer. “But you say this as if it’s a bad thing?”

It’s true: stubborn and irascible, John McCain’s living rendition of Don Quixote has been infuriating to watch. He always had a bit of the mad saint of the valley to him—a quality that has only increased with age. His breaks from conservative doctrine are manifold, but fewer in number than those of several of his fellow Senators. Yet McCain’s breaks seem so much greater than those of, say, John Warner—why? Because when he goes on his separate path, he damn well wants you to know it, and know that he thinks you and his other conservative opponents to be inches from Lucifer for your damnable orthodoxy.

Or as Lileks put it: “I like John McCain. He seems like the sort of guy you could have a beer with, right up to the moment where he smashes the bottle on the table and jams it in your face over something you said six years ago.”

It all used to have an endearing Abe Simpson quality to it—“Dear Mr. President: There are too many states. Please eliminate three.”—but there is a ferocity that has emerged in recent years that has led to countless run-ins, of the sort staffers share in loud whispers after too many drinks. They tend to remind me less of the befuddled Abe than of Richard Burton as Henry VIII responding to Woolsey in defiance of Rome—“How far would I go, you ask? I would cleave the earth in two like an apple, and fling the halves into the VOID!”

Yet this is also what I’ve always admired about McCain, even if conservatives curse him in the course of legislative battle: he is the same man, whichever side he is on. He brings that same infuriating passion to our cause when his inner compass has led him to alliance. His support of the surge confounded the glitterati of the MSM, who gave him every opportunity to break with the president in a fashion that would’ve led to countless more cover appearances for the late-night self-pleasuring of pimply interns of the New Republic. And yet he could not be agreeable to them, as tempting as the doyennes and the cameras were: he rambled through, grousing yet triumphant, middle fingers raised to Rumsfeld on the right and the New York Times on the left. Even if you dislike McCain, you have to admit: It was a glorious moment for him.

Of course, there is another candidate who shared many of these admirable traits: Rudy Giuliani. It might surprise a few of you to know that hizzoner was my first choice, and first choice by a mile, in this election. No, Rudy’s not a full-bore conservative, but we thought George W. Bush was, and we’ve all seen how that has turned out. The rationale for me was simple: the next four years will be very, very rough for the Republican Party as a whole. The next President will likely be working opposite large Democrat majorities in the House and the Senate. In such a scenario, having a President who does not fear telling Nancy Pelosi to shove it—in fact, ENJOYS the very act and revels in the consequences—is enormously advantageous. In New York City, he survived by keeping his head on a swivel, which is what you gotta do when you find yourself in a vicious cockfight. We could use that in Washington.

Nearly two years ago, I started working in a voluntary capacity alongside others to share the perspective of a dedicated social conservative with the nascent Giuliani campaign, arguing that—with a few internally consistent moves rightward on matters of judicial policy—Rudy could establish himself as the consensus second choice for many social conservatives. He could issue a sterling call for a New Federalism, as Dan McLaughlin has eloquently offered—that while personally pro-choice, he believed Roe to be bad law, wrongly decided, and that every American should have the right to have their voices heard on such an issue by voting in their state. He could argue that it was high time the federal government got back to the business of defending the country, not squabbling over marriage and stem cell funding. With such a position, I still believe that after Brownback, Huckabee, and others inevitably faded, Rudy could have been the consensus pick.

Of course, Rudy’s campaign could easily ignore me or any of the other dirty web folks saying this, but it was advice echoed publicly by genuinely smart people: Patrick Ruffini, Michael Barone and Fred Barnes among others. His campaign chose to ignore all this advice. Instead, they started believing their own name-ID-elevated tracking polls about their frontrunner status. I sat and watched in Houston as Rudy unequivocally passed on the opportunity to become a consensus candidate. They ran the most short-sighted, parochial, and—frankly—flat-out wimpy campaign I’ve ever seen at the national level without the inclusion of Dick Lugar. And that’s saying something.

It’s not like Rudy was the only disappointment, of course. This cycle has been full of them. The only candidate to overperform, as you look over the field, has been Huckabee. As a naturally gifted communicator with good instincts and an evangelistic temperament, I think that people need to recognize that Huckabee represents the views of a significant number of people in the Republican Party, whether they like it or not. If he isn’t chosen for Veep this time, I have no doubt he’ll run again for POTUS in the future, and probably with the Tom Joad impression tempered a bit. A McCain-Huckabee ticket would make Rush Limbaugh’s head explode, as it would for many of our readers, but it’s a ticket that would fully satisfy a good 75% of Republicans, if not more. That’s the reality, folks, and if you don’t like it, then get to changing it.

With Rudy’s ship sinking, Fred a non-factor, and Huckabee hampered by lack of foreign policy chops and a shoestring budget, the opportunity was there for McCain—once the establishment pick, imploded and then reborn, to once again don the armor and save the unseen Dulcinea and her doubtless properly filed FEC paperwork.

We are left with two realistically possible nominees, with hopes for a brokered convention dashed. In 2008, the question has become: do you support the calculating unprincipled friend, or the passionate principled foe?

For me, it came down to three choices, made on three critical fronts: McCain’s decision to side with President Bush on the surge, with President Bush on Alito and Roberts, and against President Bush on the largest entitlement in the history of America. In each of these areas, we were and are agreed—and in each, McCain displayed the courage and patriotism he has always possessed—the strength of character to do what he believed was right, regardless of whether it was popular.

There are other areas, yes. It’s true that when history calls out for a strong choice, I often say “No!” as McCain, onscreen, declared “Yes!” And in response to that same demand, Mitt Romney has answered loud and clear in his four years in elected office: “Present!”

We may rightly ask: what would John McCain’s first 100 days look like? I’m sure any of us could sit down and outline them in rough but accurate fashion—the good and the bad are well known to us by now, and we can anticipate them with all the regular rhythms and sound effects of a 1980s sitcom. We would have to balance against him on some things and cheer him on in others. We know him as a foe and a friend, and know him well.

On the other hand, what would Mitt Romney’s first 100 days look like? I cannot begin to answer that question, because it’s ludicrous to conceive of this as even a possibility. It simply will not happen, ever. The man has the highest negative ratings of any candidate in the field not named Hillary, and she still beats him by an easy margin—one that will only increase as the Oprah-fueled excitement gap widens.

After two-plus years of having Candidate Mitt before us, conservatives have barely scratched the surface of this candidate’s remarkable political liabilities. His weaknesses are not just small or needling—they are epic. More troubling for those who value winning, though, is the fact that Romney campaign’s reactions to assaults are easily foreseen and more easily outmaneuvered; the predictability of out-populisting Huckabee in Michigan followed by blasting John McCain’s conservative position on Medicare in Florida is the hallmark of this movable feast of a campaign (corn dogs here, caviar there, and be sure to peel the skin off that fried chicken).

As general election strategy goes, Barack Obama would have Romney twisted in all directions, with strong words and an easy smile; the Clinton machine would dismantle him piece by piece with a singsong sledgehammer, leaving bits of bone and blood as bleak warnings to future would-be CEO-politicians. The end result is the same: when he’s been chewed by the machine, Mitt Romney will come to symbolize every worst cliche of corporate greed and offense, be reviled as out of touch and inconsistent, and be mocked at length as the whitest white man in America.

Allow me a moment to be blunt: The Democrats will hand Mitt Romney his ass on a silver platter, and force him to wear it as a hat. His sunny demeanor unchanged, he will give a strong farewell speech thanking his supporters, and give the experience a solid B+.

In 2000 I wrote that Joe Lieberman was a man forever at war with his conscience—Mitt Romney battles his very self on what seems like a daily basis. At least Lieberman’s struggle was interesting and soulful—with Romney, one might as well watch varying shades of astroturf compete for territory. Find me the one issue that Mitt Romney will fall on his sword for, and it would be the first. He is not just untested and unmeasured by adversity or serious political firefights (people speak about him “saving the Olympics” as if it was something that mattered; guess what? I’ve been to the Olympics; the Olympics are the United Nations of sport, where everybody gets together to hate on America; nobody actually likes the Olympics, not even Costas), he has the CEO’s strong aversity to the very concept of things falling apart. Equipped with the flat, even optimism that only the gift of a silver spoon and prep school makeout sessions in the bushes near the quad at Cranbrook-Kingswood or Phillips-Exeter can bring to a man’s life, he comes before us as one who has never risked his all for any cause without having a fallback, who has never overcome a vice, who has never wanted for anything.

American voters are fickle creatures, but with great consistency, they recognize such poll-tested waffle-patterned on-demand candidates as being either naïve, otherworldly, or false. With Mitt Romney, would-be heir to the “once adamantly pro-choice” Ronald Reagan (“I was an Independent during Reagan-Bush, I don’t want to take us back to Reagan-Bush”), they may well judge him as all three combined. In another political day, candidates of his ilk won with regularity; they still develop a train of guppy fish lackies in some circles—yet that was before people’s inauthentic comments were fodder for the internet grind, and Romney talking about “seeing the Patriots win the World Series” would get repeated on CNN, Comedy Central, and ESPN News for the next 48 hours, and sent via YouTube to 100,000 people in mere moments. “Conservatives are such rich white idiots,” they will say, and move on.

The Reagan coalition has and will survive many things. But can it survive the total loss of one of its strongest remaining assets—the authentic, consistent, principled leadership it represents? Make no mistake: Clinton or Obama know Mitt Romney’s weaknesses, and they know those of the Republican base as well. They know the opportunity he represents to slice the Reagan legacy away from the Republican Party—a well-manicured pretender to the mantle who gets by on pancake makeup, eyebrow waxing, and hair gel.

So here we are, at the turn of the tide—and you go to the polls with the candidates you have, not the candidates you want. Saint John McCain of the Campaign-Finance Cross versus Willard of the North, well-mannered Ken Doll? The choice is an easy one for me. Let’s help old Don Quixote into the saddle one more time, and set him on his merry way, to win or lose with him.

The Reagan coalition survived Read my lips. It survived Bob Dole’s peanut butter. It survived compassionate conservatism and its kid stepbrother national greatness. And it will survive John McCain and everything he will do as our nominee and as president. In fact—in a twisted version of the ancient Vulcan proverb “Only Nixon could go to China”—only McCain can save it.

They will say the coalition is dead—but we will know better. We know it only sleeps. We will cast our votes knowing that the day will come, four years from now, when a new leader, one who knows what the shining city truly means, stands in front of the fresh-dug tomb, and calls into the blackness, as if to Lazarus—”Come out!”

And when we hear it, we will rise from out of our stupor, dust cobwebs from our arms, stumble to the door, our eyes blinking in the sunlight … and we will know our day has come.

It’s okay, you can smile. The bastards won’t know what hit ‘em.

crossposted at redstate

For some people, especially those who live and work in the District of Columbia, there is no aspect of life untouched by politics. It surrounds them like a cloud. This leads some of them to constant overanalysis of life, pop culture, and even shopping trends through the harsh lens of partisan politics. They tend to be the same people attracted to the constant unrelenting snark that the internet thrives on, and — if you said it to the subject’s face — is the sort of thing that in the old days would end with pistols and paces (as it should be, Thomas yells somewhere).

I have no idea if Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect is one of these people. But her latest written work of political analysis over at TNR just goes so far over the edge of any guidelines of respect or decorum, it exemplifies what happens when partisan political views warp the prism through which one views the world.

Namely, “Baby on Board” accuses the McCain campaign of “using [his adopted daughter] Bridget as a political football” thanks to a mailer depicting Cindy McCain with baby Bridget in her arms, standing beside a beaming Bangladeshi nun.

The text of the mailer reads in part:

“Cindy cradles little Bridget, a baby she and John adopted in 1993 from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget has been a great blessing to the McCain family. Today, Cindy and John work together to promote adoption and to help women facing crisis pregnancies.”

In these three small sentences, Goldstein finds “code words” and “symbols” of the “religious right” and “anti-choice activism.” She goes on to take several shots at Mother Theresa, and to actually suggest that the Catholic Church and pro-lifers as a whole are blissfully unaware of all of the difficulties associated with adoption. She suggests this is all an effort at playing race-based guilt politics (I’d suggest she take a look at what happened in New Hampshire on the other side of the aisle if she wants to see racial politics at its worst). And she finishes up with the idea that promoting adoption of children born in the Third World, in worlds of terrible poverty, and (in Bridget’s case) with physical disfigurement that makes one an outcast, as “the ugliest rhetorical practices of the pro-life movement.”

McCain has seven children in all, including an older daughter, Meghan, who is rather prominent. But Bridget’s interactions with the press have been careful and limited, sensitive to her. In this campaign as in others, she hasn’t been paraded about or held up as a totem. And if talking to the kids at such a prominent place as Scholastic makes one a political football, well…but let’s leave that accusation to the dustbin it deserves.

In truth, it’s not worth raising a response to the political hackery of Dana Goldstein, whose pro-abortion views clearly tint her view of the world. The response is Bridget McCain herself, who today is safe, and healthy, and loved by a family, because a woman was brave enough not to merely react with hands-off sympathy, but to gather this frail infant up in her arms and never let her go. I can venture this much: Politics was the farthest thing from her mind at the moment she held this ten week old child in her arms.

Cindy took one look in Bridget’s beautiful eyes and said, “That’s my baby, if I leave her here she’ll die.” I don’t think Cindy ever put her down.

My little sister Florence is a few years younger than Bridget. She is thirteen, and she is adopted from DC social services—not exactly as daunting a task as the McCain’s faced in their long struggle with the Bangladeshi adoption services, but still, it took long days of expense and effort.

A few months ago, she got into a conversation about abortion, of all things, with her friends at ballet practice. It’s the sort of thing 12 and 13 year old girls talk about all the time these days.

Florence, without any prompting whatsoever - and never having had a conversation about the issue with my parents, siblings, or me - listened to her friends for a while. And then she interrupted:

“So let me get this straight: you all think someone should be able to make someone like me not exist?”

I love my little sister. I love her not as a “political football,” as a “code word,” as a “rhetorical practice.” I love her because of the girl she is, and the woman she will be. And every day, Florence reminds me that we are loved not because of where we were born, because of who raised us, or because of how we grew up—and that there exists within each of us a spark of the divine, worthy of dignity and meant to be cherished as a gift.

In the real world, not everything in life is political. Dana Goldstein should try visiting it sometime.

crossposted at redstate

>> When it comes to the latest goings on in the South Carolina Republican Primary, it seems clear that this was a last hurrah for the Fred Thompson campaign. The suggested farewell marks for FDT are here. As for where conservatives go now, I think this little poll may be a better indication than I’d like. Sounds like the discussions about the life or death of the Reagan Coalition are going to be needed, after all.

As the Iowa voters prepare to go to the polls and their places of caucus, the individuals and organizations conservatives respect are raising endorsement flags above their heads, declaring their allegiances. It is time for me to follow suit. And there is no question in my mind that there is one candidate in this cycle who truly stands above the others in several significant areas.

That candidate is Mitt Romney.

I share so many opinions with my colleague Thomas, but on this one I must break from him. All of the candidates in this nomination battle have important and significant qualifications that cannot be underestimated. Yes, they have their flaws—but surely we could trust Rudy Giuliani, the man who fixed the unfixable city, to be an effective Commander in Chief; surely we could trust John McCain, patriot, war hero, old man who shakes fist at clouds, to be a just if irritable POTUS; surely we could trust Fred Thompson, irascible conservative hewn from old growth timber and stained with single malt, to slug the hippies and cut the size of government; surely we could trust Mike Huckabee to use his silver tongue to make NARAL and the ACLU’s collective heads explode on a daily basis; surely we could trust Ron Paul (albeit in an alternate parallel universe where human nature does not exist and there is no need for interstate highways) to rule his idyllic Randian paradise with a soft yet perfectionist touch, fanned with palm fronds by volunteer Oompah Loompahs who sing glorious songs about the gold standard that would make your heart break.

These are good, committed men. There is much in them to appreciate. Yet these candidates all pale when compared to THE Man, Mitt Romney.

Some may point out that Mitt Romney has the least political experience of any candidate in this field. This is of course a bigoted lie. The least politically experienced candidate in this field is, after all, Alan Keyes. And Mitt Romney’s achievements in his lone electoral victory in Massachusetts cannot be underestimated in any respect. As everyone who knows anything knows, Massachusetts residents speak of the Romney years with a mournful fondness unmatched in human history, except perhaps of Adam and Eve speaking in their old age of the lost Garden of Eden. Most cannot speak of it without breaking into a fountain of regretful tears, crying on street corners, wearing sackcloth and ashes as they beg for the return of their lost executive. In the waning days of the Romney rule, one fellow I know actually took to standing outside of the governor’s mansion holding a boombox above his head playing “In Your Eyes,” begging the governor to stay, wailing as if pining for a lost lover.

But Massachusetts’ loss will be America’s gain, as our golden hero brings his unique amalgam of talent in such a critical time in our nation’s history. He has run the best statewide healthcare insurance plan in the country, the best investment capital group in the global economy, and the best Olympics pageant in the history of mankind. Imagine what such a man can do with the United Nations! I know I, for one, am very excited.

Some may say that Romney is merely Steve Forbes circa 2000, a wealthy man attempting to buy a nomination, with few principles but a better face. This is a shallow, bigoted lie. Mitt Romney’s other physical features are also far more attractive than Mr. Forbes’, as anyone could tell you. Mr. Forbes also showed himself to be an inflexible and non-representative politician what with his loyalty to the so-called Flat Tax and his dedicated work on behalf of fiscal conservatism. To be charitable, perhaps it is true that in one area, and one area only, Mitt Romney lags behind Mr. Forbes—Mr. Forbes has an obvious and ironic sense of humor and wit, as displayed with verve on Saturday Night Live, while Governor Romney’s laugh has been called “robot-like,” “less human than Al Gore,” and “like a horse coughing on a large fly” by some. But no worries, he is cognizant of this minor personal flaw—we are continuing to work with the focus group on this and will have the Romney laugh resolved into a smooth, hearty guffaw in time for the general election.

Some may say that Romney’s endorsement by the National Review was a dark moment in the history of that fine journal. This is yet another bigoted lie. The truth is that the New York offices of the National Review have been very even handed throughout this entire process. They have weighed each candidate equally, and found the rest wanting. They do have high standards—the National Review famously declined to endorse Dwight D. Eisenhower, after all—but in each and every way that was meaningful, Mitt Romney represents their views.

This brings us to an important point. Some may say that Romney is not a candidate who can be trusted. This is another bigoted lie. On the contrary: we can absolutely trust him! We can trust him to follow the path that our country charts for him. Are we not interested in representative government? Of course we are! And Mitt Romney is perhaps the most representative of all the candidates to ever seek the presidency of any nation, ever, even the imaginary ones with the aforementioned Oompah Loompahs—there is nothing untrustworthy about this man, not even his hair. When the electorate wants him to believe something, he believes it! When they want him to oppose something, he opposes it! When they are divided, he waffles! This is man is not just the one to lead our nation—he symbolizes it in all its indecisive, fickle greatness, just as Ronald Reagan did when he stopped being pro-choice!

Some may say that comparing Romney to Reagan is like comparing 98 Degrees to The Beatles. But they are by that very argument revealing themselves as nothing more than shallow bigots who have allowed their bigoted minds to overwhelm their slightly less-bigoted hearts to create a bigoted bigot-fest of bigotry.

The example, however, provides some interesting comparisons. It is true that America loves all things processed and manufactured—one need only note the aisles of meats, cheeses, music, television, and grande lite vanilla soy frappucinos. But it is also true that for every giddy, screaming fan of such sparkling pre-packaged talent as Ashley Simpson, Jamie Lynn Spears, or Hannah Montana, there are also “player-haters” who denounce these nipped, tucked, remastered and vacuum-sealed productions as “sickeningly sweet” or “almost repulsive” or “no-talent assclowns.”

Yet as the Republican brand faces an identity crisis, shouldn’t we take a cue from reality television and the boy band mafia? The American people LIKE things that are processed, predictable, and fluctuate as needed. Don’t we believe, as free market conservatives, that the market should get what it wants? This is an on-demand culture, and it’s time we met the demand with the man who understands how to adapt the best, and the fastest, to suit the needs of the moment.

Don’t you see? When the bigoted liars attack Mitt Romney for saying things like “let me check my notes” on an issue as important as the tactical surge in Iraq, they are merely confusing a negative with a positive. Aren’t you tired of the tone-deaf administration we’ve got right now? Under a Mitt Romney administration, our president will understand America enough to know that he needs to check the polls up to the very minute of the State of the Union address to determine what he ought to say about our Global Warming policy. Want to make it illegal to drive cars? Want to make it illegal NOT to drive a Hummer? America, now you too can decide! Just dial the number and press 1 or 2 respectively to make your voice heard.

Some may say, such as Redstate’s own Dan McLaughlin in his well-written but clearly wrong-headed series on the Unbearable Lightness of Mitt, that Romney is a liability for the Republican Party—that he has the highest negatives of any potential nominee, rivaling Hillary Clinton’s. Some may say that Mitt Romney’s path to the nomination would be a victory for the lowest common denominator. And some may say that given the power of the Executive Branch, Mitt Romney’s cadre of loyal supporters will be like Clintonites on speed, leaving a path of vindictive destruction as they target bigoted liars to be investigated, audited, and personally embarrassed.

These are all bigoted lies, and if you believe them, please register your complaint below while including your email, permanent address, and SSN for our files. We will contact you after the election.

I have chosen not to listen to such fools. Fie upon them. It is the dawn of the age of the pre-packaged candidate. Look on Mitt Romney’s works, ye mighty bigots, and despair.

crossposted at redstate

>> Over at Redstate, I wrote something about the tragic tale of Jamie Leigh Jones. This young woman deserves far better, and those on the right who wish to dismiss her story should be ashamed. I have no idea if the corporations here did anything wrong - the courts of law will prove that, one way or the other - but I have no reason to doubt her story, and urge those on the internet to exercise restraint. Not everything in life is about your personal politics.

“Come now,” I asked a Louisiana friend a few months ago, who used to work for Gov. Mike Huckabee, “Mike Huckabee’s a nice guy, but you can’t think he’s actually presidential material? I’m not sure even Mike Huckabee thinks Mike Huckabee is presidential material.”

“You might be surprised,” my friend said. “He’s a strange cat.”

“Maybe he’s just trolling for Veep? He could be a good Veep for some of these guys.”

“Here’s the thing you’ve gotta know about Mike,” my friend said. “He’s a prisoner who’s trying to break out. A prisoner of his birth, of being from Hope, of being a Southern Baptist preacher, of being from Arkansas and succeeding only in Arkansas…everything he’s done in life is about wanting to be bigger and better and have an impact beyond where started.”

“Forget President. Mike Huckabee wants to be an International Man of Mystery.”

We moved on to other topics, and I forgot about it at the time. It was way back when, 60 days ago, when Mike Huckabee was hovering below the 10% mark or less nationally, and had about as good of a shot at being the Republican nominee as Stephen Colbert. He was supposed to be another also-ran, a dancing bear from the early heydays of the three ring primary circus, with its cacophony of sound, kitsch, Fair Taxes, and sculpted butter princesses. This is what junior grade political campaigns do for fun before things get serious, before the kids leave the table so the adults can talk.

But somewhere along the way, something odd happened: the Mike Huckabee campaign turned out to be real.

Very real indeed, in fact: If the latest polling is to be believed, Mike Huckabee could realistically finish first in Iowa, third in New Hampshire, first in South Carolina, and second in Florida. This would be an incredible surge of momentum in January, all leading up to the 2/5 multi-state showdown that not even Carnac the Magnificent can decipher.

The rise is due to a multitude of factors: Huckabee has a solid base to grow on, with excellent ability to reach out to evangelical social conservatives – many of whom felt particularly left out of this cycle, disappointed in Thompson and Romney as candidates. Add to that the more mainstream Republicans who had hoped Giuliani would turn out to have fewer flaws than he has, and it’s clear Huckabee has tapped into a wide range of GOP voters who were still looking for an answer to the question: Who’s going to lead us against Hillary, make us proud, and actually win?

As the debates have gotten more and more viewership among Republican voters, Huckabee’s natural political abilities have shined, and many Republicans believe they’ve found their answer. Huckabee’s no policy wonk; he’s a communicator, naturally suited for the pulpit and the podium. There’s a bit of the snake oil salesman about him at times, and one suspects he could’ve sold bushels of it off a stump back in the day, but he does it naturally, without apparent malice or Romney’s nervous rehearsal tics. After years of wishing for a president who had the ability to bob, weave, and think on his feet when confronted with difficulty, Republican primary voters love this quality in Huckabee.

And there’s something more: if in this strength Huckabee does not resemble President Bush, in a great many others, he greatly resembles the W. we met in 2000. Huckabee is a southern social conservative who speaks the language of compassion and reaches out to minority voters, like Bush; he is accused of lacking the experience needed to lead the country in a difficult time, like Bush was; and he has a foreign policy resume that is quite thin when matched up against, say, John McCain…again, we see the similarities.

Perhaps this is just a sign that, as Peter Beinart and other less sophisticated sources have suggested, the country is in many ways returning to a pre-9/11 political mindset. As the news from Iraq turns more positive and people are convinced American troops will return home in the near future, they are evaluating candidates as they did before that trying event: based on personality and having a winning smile, not strategic capability or anti-terror rhetoric. So Rudy fades, Huckabee rises, and the country changes again, back toward the way it was.

There are differences too, of course – revealing ones. Unlike Bush, Huckabee has no money, no organization, no institutional support, no Karl Rove, and started with very little name ID. He is perhaps better known as “that governor who used to be fat” than the favored son in a political dynasty. Yale and Harvard aren’t on his resume; Huckabee started from scratch, and had to build his success by using his natural gifts to the fullest. Where Bush gave clumsy answers about his faith, and was mocked (though it turned out to benefit him) for referencing Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher, Huckabee has given excellent responses to challenging questions about evolution, homosexuality in the military and in marriage, abortion, social justice and the death penalty. This is his wheelhouse, and Huckabee hasn’t missed a pitch.

And there’s another area where Huckabee is unlike Bush: W never faced this kind of revulsion by a portion of the base of his own party. We’ve witnessed a good deal of this on RedState of late. Much of this is deserved; there is little in Huckabee’s political resume to suggest that he is or will govern as a fiscal conservative, and there is a real concern that his brand of politics will leave many socially libertarian, fiscally conservative or security minded voters cold.

That said, we should be surprised by how hateful some of these responses are to a candidate who is, whether you like him or not, clearly conservative to moderate across the board. Republicans nationally were quite satisfied with Huckabee’s rise in Arkansas, his political tenure hardly had the kind of question-raising incidents of GOP disloyalty that Mayor Giuliani’s did, and I’m sure we’d all be supporting Huckabee if he were running for Senate instead. He certainly didn’t pass a statewide universal health care plan, or anything like that – but is that supposed to be a negative?

In any case, he’s the hottest property now, so Politics 101 says attack, attack, attack. Over the past three days, I’ve received emails from opposing campaigns comparing Huckabee to Democrats from Bill Clinton to Jimmy Carter, History’s Greatest Monster. They seem to be particular fans of using this Wayne Dumond case against Huckabee, despite the candidate’s own clearly agonized experience on an issue which has absolutely no relevance to his experience as president (unless one thinks Huckabee is going to roll back the death penalty as commander in chief, a ludicrous thought when one considers that he executed more criminals than any prior Arkansas Governor, and obviously than anyone else in this race). Or they get after him for loving swag as governor, as if he’s the only state executive to get gifts from folks (and heck, people, Arkansas ain’t that different from Louisiana – it’s not like he got a bunch of cattle futures).

The point is, this is getting ridiculous, folks. An email today went out from a campaign that shall remain off the record, except to say that they were based in large part on the reporting of Murray Waas. Hear me on this: If Murray Waas were to pen any article against any candidate’s campaign, it would be dismissed as the writings of a seriously unbalanced person with a penchant for wild accusation. But now that he’s a source against Mike Huckabee, we should treat this raving leftist as a valid journalistic source? I thought we were better than that, people. Take me off your list, because the next time you send me something, anything, based on the writings of Murray Waas, it goes on the front page of this site for all to see.

Mike Huckabee has numerous reasons that we should question his fiscal conservatism, his ability to govern the country in time of war, and his political staying power in a race against Hillary. But these are all valid questions we should debate and discuss – Huckabee released an immigration plan today that marks a much stronger statement than his earlier comments on the issue in my mind (did Chuck Norris write this?).

To me, I see one flawed candidate among many, one who has the ability to out-communicate and perhaps outwit the Left. It’s an attractive quality, and I can understand why people like it. It’s not enough for me – my chief concern is that, as with W on No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Prescription Drug benefit, conceding to the language of the left to make a political case for conservative solutions ultimately turned into passing the language of the left into law. But let’s wait and see what the would-be International Man of Mystery does over the coming month, and then decide how he stacks up against Rudy, McCain, Romney and the rest.

The circus is about to close, and the real race is about to start. It’s time for the adults to talk.

crossposted at redstate.com

As most of you know, I worked in the White House Speechwriting Office during the summer of 2002 as an intern – doing research, acting as support staff for the lead speechwriters, and contributing here and there – prior to joining the Administration as a speechwriter for Tommy Thompson in the fall. So at first, I foolishly thought Matt Scully’s article in The Atlantic about the inner workings of the office under Mike Gerson was a bit too insider-focused to get a lot of attention – who wants to read that kind of office gossip, after all? Just a bit of bad blood between coworkers, nothing particularly glamorous or tawdry about it.

Peter Baker’s A1 followup story in The Washington Post over the weekend shows how wrong I was. Apparently the squabble over Matt’s depiction of the oft-profiled Mike as a attention-loving scribe has just enough rancorous appeal in it to satisfy readers during the long hot gossip-starved DC summer. Vitter’s old news, so a sniping match between wonks will have to suffice.

Good speechwriting breeds a particular kind of personality. Few successful speechwriters are particularly egotistical. You have to lack the desire for ownership of your best writing, yet be a skilled enough writer to quiet your own voice, and instead adopt the vocabulary and tone of a political leader with whom you may have nothing in common, not even policy views.

Yet there’s another facet of personality there, as well – one that Henry Kissinger described eloquently in a brief paragraph in his memoirs which speaks of a long history of internal strife over remarks:

The choice of speechwriters always determined the tone and not infrequently the substance of a Presidential speech. The common conception is that speechwriters are passive instruments who docilely craft into elegant prose the policy thought of their principals. On the contrary, the vast majority of them are frustrated principals themselves who seek to use their privileged position to put over their own ideas.

There’s a lot of truth in that. And it’s one of the reasons that, for years, it was part of the unwritten speechwriter code that you 1) never publicly take credit for a line someone else delivered, 2) never let yourself become a story, and 3) you all rise and sink together as a team. That’s just part of what it means to be one of the people sitting behind the decisionmakers, the men and women who actually sit at the table.

The speechwriting process just helps bolster those rules. The speeches I contributed to in 2002 were really just anecdotes or lines here and there in relatively unimportant addresses – and on the rare occasion where a significant amount of material that I gave to the writers to put in a first draft actually made it through, I was just happy to have contributed. I’d occasionally tell friends to turn on C-SPAN or read a transcript where I’d contributed a key anecdote or thought there were some particularly excellent lines – the lovely Kristen Mugford (now the lovely Kristen Hayner ) and I spent many hours putting together some great stuff for the Ohio State Commencement address – but that was all.

There wasn’t a single speech that went through that wasn’t a group effort, and we understood that we were just a small part of a hard working team. That was the same rationale that informed my later speechwriting work. My attitude was always that if a line went over well, it was just inspired by the boss. If it didn’t, or if it got flack or became controversial, then hey, that was from me. That, I think, is the proper attitude of any staffer.

Personally, were I in Matt’s position, I’d probably have let Gerson keep going with his profiles and basking in praise without offering a public response (the same choice John McConnell has apparently made). It just seems petty to get into squabbles about such things after the fact. But then, I’ve never had Gerson do the kind of petty things he evidently did…according to that article, the credit-claiming internally was far worse than I ever thought or witnessed. From Matt’s perspective, it seems that Mike had a tendency to confuse himself with the man at the table. Everyone’s heard the “fine China” line already, but this is the one portion that seemed particularly bad to me:

I happened to be sitting at Mike’s laptop when it came time for us to send the very last draft to senior staff, and Mike, noticing that I had cc’d John and myself, stopped me: “Don’t do that! You can print copies from here!” I said, “Michael, why can’t I copy John and me?” This brought a frantic admission: “Because they don’t know you’re involved!” “And why is it a secret that we’re doing this together?” Because it was all very confidential, Mike explained as he rushed off—senior staff didn’t want anything leaking out. This performance was repeated at the White House, when Mike insisted that the usual author identifications not appear on drafts going to the president, or pouted when our department secretary put all three names there anyway. He seemed to think this was standard practice—just “the way it’s done” in Washington.

Matt was, and is, a brilliant and quirky man, and a very personable guy. He liked to sit in his office and eat his odd-smelling vegan food, but other than that, he was always circulating in the offices, joking, charming, laughing. He was an odd cat, but he was very fun to be around, and he kept people from stressing out too much in a very stressful time. He was fit and happy. He and John – two people who couldn’t be more unalike in lifestyle – would shoot the breeze for hours, having epic, hilarious conversations around speechmaking. Being in the room with them for just a few minutes could teach you more about speechwriting than years of classes. The most enjoyable part of my job was bringing them research for a minor speech, or an anecdote for a bigger one, and start them riffing on some historical figure or a ridiculous story from their long history of speechwriting.

[A side note: in my opinion, John was the most talented of the bunch, and the writer who got the President's voice the best. I didn't know it at the time, but the article seems to indicate that Matt agrees. In response to Ramesh's point, let me just say that JPod is absolutely correct. You could go through your entire life as a political insider without hearing about John McConnell, but if you saw his work laid out end to end on a page, you'd be shocked at how much exceptional material he's created, and how much you recognize. But John being John, you never will.]

The office was really quite enjoyable when I was there. Junior writer Ed Walsh was hilarious. The quiet, retiring Joe Shattan was a pleasure to work with, neurotic, shy, yet very endearing. Pete Wehner is a policy nerd’s nerd, but he embraces it – steady and responsible, he was like the MiniMe version of Bill Bennett in many ways (he’d written for Bennett for years prior). Working with Pete for several months illustrated that he was (and is) truly unique in Washington circles: he had no apparent vices, at all. And loyal to a fault, constant as the northern star. I am not at all surprised that Pete is siding with Mike in this.

Gerson, on the other hand, came across as a bit of a loner, the least interested in others. He never seemed to want to be in the office, and wasn’t the kind of person to say hello to you in the halls of the EEOB. He didn’t bother to learn people’s names if you weren’t important to him. I was lucky enough to have lunch with him in the White House Mess one day, and it was ridiculously, disappointingly dull. He’s clearly a genius for words, and a very good speechwriter, but he gave the impression of not having time for anything except sharing his brilliance. Privately, my friends and I compared him to Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan – the kind of fellow who thought of himself as a normal all-American guy, but if you pushed him to talk about what he really valued, he’d start with Willie Mays and quickly end up at “Sentimental Education by Flaubert.”

The only time I saw Mike brighten up to a significant degree was when a group of Wheaton kids came in at one point, and he shared stories about his experiences working for the President over the past several years. His respect for POTUS was demonstrable and real, and he was emphatically supportive of the mission of the White House. He liked being in that role, and it seemed to bring out the best in him. Thinking back, it makes me wonder if the bulk of the praising profiles of Mike that so irked Matt weren’t motivated by a similar rationale; not so much that Mike wanted to shine, but that he thought being more public about the reasoning behind remarks would illustrate how seriously the White House took the issues they were addressing.

Or perhaps this is just Kissinger’s line coming true once again. We can’t know motivations, after all. I prefer to assume the best in this circumstance.

Mike, Matt and John were given more access to the President than any previous Republican speechwriting team (infamously, Noonan had never met Reagan when she became a speechwriter for him, and didn’t meet with him frequently even after coming on staff). They did exceptional work for him as a team. I was proud, for a short time and in very small ways, to contribute to that team effort. And it will be very sad if, years from now, people remember this speechwriters’ spat instead of the eloquent, inspiring, and meaningful work that the whole of the team did, when the country needed it so.

(Originally posted by Ben on August 13, 2007)

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)