Soccer Dad

Jindal elected

Bobby Jindal won the race for Governor of Lousiana in his second try.

Outside the Beltway has his impressive credentials.

In 2012 or 2016 could he be the Republican nominee for president?

Given the experience of Mississippi post-Katrina, it's not unreasonable to wonder if things would have been different in Louisiana had Jindal won four years ago.

Indeed (without criticizing Governor Blanco) wrote about what went wrong in the early governmental response to Katrina in his state.

There have already been a number of instances in which an overly inhibitive bureaucracy prevented an appropriate response to the disaster. For example, on Wednesday of last week a company called my office. With only three hours before rising waters would make the mission impossible, they were anxious to send a rescue helicopter for their stranded employees. They wanted to know who would give them a go-ahead.

We could not identify the agency with authority. We heard that FEMA was in charge, that the FAA was in charge, and that the military was in charge. I went in person to talk with a FEMA representative and still could not get a straight answer. Finally we told the company to avoid interfering with Coast Guard missions, but to proceed on its own. Sometimes, asking for forgiveness is better than asking for permission.

It seems that Jindal wouldn't be averse to the WEMA approach.

Here's a nice profile of Jindal and why his emergence may be important in the near future.

It was 1995, and Republican Mike Foster had just been elected governor. Rep. McCrery and then-Sen. John Breaux were impressed with Mr. Jindal's report and recommended him to Mr. Foster's transition team. Eventually he met the governor-elect, who proclaimed Mr. Jindal a "genius" and offered him the top job in the state's Health and Hospitals Department. He was 24. "I realized: 'Well, I guess I'm not going to medical school anymore.' "

Instead, he spent the next eight years amassing the résumé of a technocratic wunderkind. He eliminated his department's $400 million budget deficit by reducing the payroll and aggressively pursuing private hospitals that had overcharged for Medicaid services. Later he served as executive director of a bipartisan Medicare advisory commission (Sen. Breaux was a co-chairman), president of the University of Louisiana system, and an assistant secretary of health and human services in the Bush administration.

With the upcoming entitlement crisis due to the aging baby boomers, Gov-elect Jindal has experience dealing with health spending. Might he be able to do on a national level what he's done for Louisiana?

more at memeorandum.

UPDATE: A lot of you are coming here from a critic. Perhaps it's overstating it to say that Jindal will be a presidential candidate in 8 years. On the other hand he has accomplished quite a bit already in Louisiana, if he's as successful running the whole state as he was running a single agency, that's not overstating his potential.

bobby jindal.