Category Archives: Gov. Bobby Jindal

Bobby Jindal To GOP: ‘It’s Time To Get Over’ Election Loss

Governor Bobby Jindal’s poll numbers may be low in Louisiana, but once again he’s giving his fellow Republicans some sage advice.  The last time he gave the GOP advice, they were not too happy with his choice of words.

The Huffington Post

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) spoke at a GOP dinner in New Hampshire on Friday, urging his fellow Republicans to “get over” last year’s electoral defeats and instead focus on reassessing party priorities ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

“We lost an election that we probably should have won,” Jindal said at a GOP fundraiser in Manchester, N.H., according to ABC News. “It’s time to get over it. … I think we can win elections by sticking to our principles, but I do think we need to make some changes and I think we need to think seriously about where we go from here.”

He continued, “We spent too much time last year criticizing the other side without saying what we were going to do instead, without saying what we were for.”

The Republican governor made headlines last year when he called on members of his party to end “dumbed-down conservatism” and “stop being the stupid party.” During his New Hampshire speech, Jindal offered an explanation for those remarks.

“What I meant by that was we’ve got to present thoughtful policy solutions to the American people — not just bumper stickers, not just 30-second solutions,” Jindal said, according to the Washington Times. “We have to have the confidence and the courage in our convictions and show them that our ideas will benefit them.”

Jindal has frequently been floated as a potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. However, he has brushed off the speculation, insisting that it is too early to wade into the race.

“Anybody on the Republican side even thinking or talking about running for president in 2016, I’ve said, needs to get their head examined,” Jindal said during a February appearance on “Fox and Friends.” “And the reason I say that is, we’ve lost two presidential elections in a row, we need to be winning the debate of ideas– then we’ll win elections.”

 

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G.O.P. Seeks To Crib Obama’s Campaign Playbook

Alan Colmes’ Liberaland

The extent of the party’s 2012 failure has finally sunk in:

The Republican National Committee is reviewing the party’s deficiencies, particularly in technology and grass-roots organizing, that contributed to Mitt Romney’s sound defeat last year. The excuses and grievances that several top Republicans offered up after the election have been supplanted by pledges to strengthen the party.

“We need to get people organized and learn from what Obama did,” said Mike Duncan, a former national party chairman who now represents Kentucky on the committee. “ We’ve got to reverse engineer what they did and leapfrog to the next cycle.”building-obamacare.jpeg3-460x307

… Republican leaders acknowledged the urgent need to make the party more welcoming to a broader cross-section of Americans, particularly women, Hispanics and blacks.

The consensus is that this was a failure at the top of the Republican Party:

Republican officials from across the country said a new tone is needed, and they called on the party to take cues from its 30 governors rather than become consumed by Republicans’ differences in Washington.

But, as Joan Walsh points out in a new analysis at Salon, using LA Gov. Bobby Jindal as an example, this strategy reveals a new Achilles’ heel or two for the Party of Reagan:

The man hailed by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza for his readiness to “speak truth to GOP power” in a tedious speech to the Republican National Committee Thursday night is anything but a rebel or renegade. One night before his big 2016 star turn, Jindal was forced by national outrage to reverse himself on what is one of the ugliest GOP policy decisions in an ugly decade: cutting Medicaid funding for hospice care. His health secretary actually announced the decision Wednesday night as hospice backers gathered for a mournful candlelight vigil.

Good timing; continued attention to Jindal’s hospice cruelty might have made it tough for him to be the new public face of what he hopes will be the diversity-friendly GOP.

Yet Jindal’s other cruel cuts are set to stand – cuts to battered women’s shelter programs, to higher education, preschool programs, anti-truancy efforts and a range of other efforts to make life better for low-income people. Meanwhile Jindal wants to replace the state’s income tax with more regressive sales taxes.

Meet the new GOP, just the same as the old GOP…

 

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