The best medicine we can find:
Jindal may not be a candidate in 2012. If he’s got to run for re-election in 2011, it would be hard to wrap up that campaign in November and put one together in Iowa for January. But he’s only 37, so it might be more realistic to put him on the 2016 or 2020 list of possibilities.
He said in an interview, “We have to match our actions with our rhetoric,” adding, “Republicans were defending spending they would absolutely criticize if it were proposed by the other side.”
Jindal said the GOP had to rid the party of corrupt officials, and “we have to be the party of solutions. We need to apply our conservative principles to the issues Americans care about – health care, energy costs, economic challenges and international threats.”
He pushed a tough ethics bill through his legislature to make Louisiana more attractive for growth. Next, he plans to push health-care reform.
It’s not enough to say Republicans oppose a health-care system run entirely by the government, he said. “We have to offer real solutions – refundable tax credits, electronic record keeping, reinsurance for catastrophic illness and preventative-care incentives.”
On the other hand, Jindal might eschew a run for re-election in 2011 and just start working on his 2012 program…a lot of this will depend, I believe, on how Jindal views his chances…if Obama is very strong by, say, February of 2011, then Jindal might view his best chance as being 2016. On the other hand, if Obama is weakened seriously by that point, then 2012 is the time to get in. Be that as it may, Governor Jindal is right – we have to offer solutions rather than criticism and we have to be true to our GOP and conservative principles.
Maintaining low taxes and strong defense will remain staples of the GOP program, but we also have to start figuring out what we’ll do to, say, change the debate on Life from a debate over whether abortion, itself, should be legal to a debate over what sort of people we are in respect to life. Our ultimate goal is an America which welcomes each new person, allows them maximum personal liberty in a well-ordered social structure and defends this society from all enemies, foreign and domestic, who would seek to overthrow it.
So, how do we get there? That is the question we must ponder and come up with answers for. It may be that Obama’s policies grease the skids on our return to power, but we can’t count on that – even if it happens that way, if we haven’t carefully thought out what we want to do, having power in our hands will be an exercise in futility. In the long run, it is better if we win convincingly after campaigning on a clear set of conservative programs designed to advance our overall world view – that is the way to cement our power and reforms into the American body politic.
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