Jindal's Train Wreck, or: How Obama Won the Political Center

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:02:44 -0500

Funny how Bobby Jindal was labeled a conservative Republican intellectual and then laid that big egg which heavy hitters in the conservative punditocracy denounce as intellectually bankrupt.

Namely David Brooks. (Yep, best use of "nihilism" since De Beauvoir hurled it at Arthur Koestler like a broken wine glass in the Deaux Magots that night back in '51 when...)

Channeling Brooks, what the GOP's Mahatma of the Bayou should have done was erect at least a respectable edifice for neo-Reaganism.

In other words, point out that while Reagan had tamed the bureaucratic beast in the 1980s, responsible conservatism--as a living, breathing body of thought--acknowledges a role for government intervention in the economy, especially when that means either saving capitalism itself or outfitting the free market with crutches when it stumbles and breaks a leg...or two. And also point out that, in times of trouble, Mother Mary's governmental safety net is needed for cushioning the truly needy's fall, which is something vouchsafed by none other than Reagan himself even in the early '80s (he endured a nasty recession, too) when his preaching from the "government's the problem not the solution" gospel was at its most influential.

So, having made a case for smart government in dire times, Jindal then should have attacked the stim as disfiguringly flawed even by the standards of liberal economic (Keynesian) orthodoxy--not enough emphasis on private sector job creation (infrastructure, including maybe even something visionary like rebuilding the nation's energy grid) with too much emphasis on creating government jobs...yada yada yada. (Well, he tried to do that with his weak little volcano monitoring jab, but it connected with nothing but air.)

Had he begun to articulate what the right's intellectual chattering class instantly would have rose-petaled as neo-Reaganism, Jindal today would be the intellectual doyenne of an American conservatism which is desperately seeking Susan the mom w/kids and bills to pay, as well as philosophical rejuvenation and day-to-day tactical guidance.

Instead, he's the "GOP's formerly Great non-Caucasian Hope, one who succeeded at nothing other than parodying the high Reagan style

Yes, he told people-are-good/government-is-bad homilies, but with none of The Gipper's flair or finesse, and although, in an apparent homage to the Gipper and some of his more colorful "anecdotes" about Cadillac-driving welfare queens, Jindal did manage to just make shit up, the Mahatma of the Bayou is paying a heavy price for getting caught in a web of homespun lies.

Sorry, Booby. The Gip was Teflon. You ain't.

So, is it really so impossible today to make a case for limited government economic intervention as a general American conservative rule? To depart from free-market orthodoxy just enough to assert potentially massive short-term government intervention in unusual or emergency circumstances even when that intervention would invoke private-sector rehabilitation as a first principle and guiding doctrine?

Looking at Jindall's dilemma from another angle, the answer appears to be, "Yes," because, had Tiny Bubbles done a Brooksian/neo-Reagan song and dance, he'd have risked expulsion from the current Cantor/Boehner High Church for straying way too far from the tax-breaks-as-universal-panacea fold.

And that would have exposed the GOP, which increasingly these days looks like its wandering in some Robert Taftian Twilight Zone wilderness, and shown the extent to which President Obama has decisively shifted the center of debate in this country to the left.

coolredneckliberal's Open Salon Blog

Jindal's Train Wreck, or: How Obama Won the Political Center