Of the many names being paraded before the American public as possible vice presidential nominees for the GOP ticket, none is better than Governor Piyush “Bobby” Jindal of Louisiana. Jindal is a proven executive who has implemented real reform in Louisiana.
Grover Norquist, in an op-ed on Politico.com, made a strong case for Jindal by passionately promoting Jindal’s success in education reform.
When it comes to education reform, Obama has offered gimmickry, with contests and calls to throw more money at the problem, lest he upset the teachers union bosses who help bankroll Democratic campaigns.
Jindal, in stark contrast, last month signed one of the most significant school choice bills in U.S. history. It allows 380,000 students from low- and middle-income households across Louisiana to escape substandard schools. Sadly, Obama’s 2013 budget would trap 1,600 low-income Washington, D.C., children in failing schools by ending the District’s successful and popular school voucher program. Students in the D.C. voucher program have a 91 percent graduation rate, compared with 55 percent for union-run D.C. public schools. Meanwhile, Jindal just created the nation’s second-largest school voucher program, second only to the one Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed last year.
While Obama has doomed the future of children from some of the District’s poorest sections, Jindal has offered hope and opportunity to hundreds of thousands of families — empowering parents, rewarding success and instituting accountability.
Here’s how David Frum at CNN describes Jindal: “A brilliant policy mind with an inspirational life story who has run an effective government in corruption-tainted Louisiana. He can talk data with Romney and credibly sit at the kitchen tables of the struggling middle class.”
In Running Mate Revelation on The American Spectator, Quin Hillyer lists a panoply of Jindal attributes that make him a great choice for VP.
No single person better combines the ability to excite the Republican “base” with the breadth of resumé experience, the reformist record, and the proven ability of crisis management than does Jindal. At age 25 he rescued Louisiana’s state health-care system from Medicaid-induced collapse; he helped forge a national Medicare solution (along Paul Ryan’s later lines) that won over Democratic moderates like John Breaux and Bob Kerrey but fell short when Bill Clinton pulled the plug during the Lewinsky mess; he ran Louisiana’s second-largest system of colleges; he served as the number two guy at the federal Department of Health and Human Services; he served three years in Congress and emerged from Hurricane Katrina as the only Louisiana politician with his stature enhanced by his highly effective responses; and he has been the most successful conservative reformer (and the only re-elected one) ever to serve as Louisiana’s governor. As governor he pushed through some needed ethics reformed, pared state government, kept taxes low, handled the BP oil spill superbly, and pushed through (partly in his first term, partly in his second) a series of education reforms (expanding choice and improving accountability) that, combined, probably outstrip even those of Florida’s Jeb Bush and Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson as the boldest and best school improvements in modern American history.
