The best man for the job: GOP voters should give Bobby Jindal a chance

Ideas don’t run for President, people do. The case for Jindal as the 45th President of the United States begins with his broad, varied and highly relevant experience. While Jindal is the youngest of the 18 candidates remaining in the two parties’ fields, he is also the most experienced. Of five types of relevant experience for the presidency (executive experience, political leadership experience, national security experience, military combat service, and private sector business experience), no candidate left in the field has all five (Rick Perry did) – then again, only three of our Presidents can plausibly lay claim to all five (George Washington, Andrew Jackson and George H.W. Bush). But nobody still running can beat Jindal’s preparation for the varied and unpredictable demands of the presidency and for overcoming the specific obstacles Washington throws up in the path of a conservative reformer.

To start with, the Presidency is an executive job, and Jindal’s been a two-term Governor, an executive (unlike Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, who have little or no executive experience) of a public entity (unlike Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson who have none in the public sector) and the man in charge (unlike Hillary Clinton, who has run an executive Department (badly) but never been the person on whose desk the buck was supposed to stop for good). As for political leadership, Jindal was a successful enough to win re-election in 2011 with almost 66% of the vote, the largest margin of any candidate for Governor in the 40-year history of Louisiana’s jungle primary system. On his watch, Republicans gained their first majorities in the Louisiana state House and Senate since Reconstruction in 2010 and 2011, respectively. They hold them still, and likely will continue to do so even if Jindal’s arch-rival in the Louisiana GOP, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) 85%, fails to hold the Governor’s mansion on November 21. Jindal’s approval ratings in his second term have not been great, but that is very largely a symptom of the fact that he has continued to fight for tax reform, spending restraint and other reforms rather than just sit on his political capital and let it rust.