Excessive Intellectual Capacity?
Sometimes you read things like this and you just shake your head.
FRANKLINTON, La., Oct. 17 — An Oxford-educated son of immigrants from India is virtually certain to become the leading candidate for Louisiana’s next governor in Saturday’s primary election. It would be an unlikely choice for a state that usually picks its leaders from deep in the rural hinterlands and has not had a nonwhite chief executive since Reconstruction.
But peculiar circumstances have combined to make Representative Bobby Jindal, a conservative two-term Republican, the overwhelming favorite. Analysts predict Mr. Jindal, 36, could get more than 50 percent of the vote in the open primary, thus avoiding a November runoff and becoming the nation’s first Indian-American governor. If he fails to win a majority, he would face the next-highest vote getter in the runoff.
Louisiana Democrats are demoralized, caught between the perception of post-hurricane incompetence surrounding their standard bearer, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who is not running for re-election, and corruption allegations against senior elected officials like William J. Jefferson, the congressman from New Orleans.
Leading Democrats begged off the governor’s race, and Mr. Jindal’s opponents are from the second tier, trailing so badly in polls that Mr. Jindal has ignored most of the scheduled debates among candidates, leaving the challengers to take grumbling verbal shots at his empty chair……
……….Insinuations about his excessive intellectual capacity are still being made. “It’s not going to be about the smartest person in this race,” Walter Boasso, a Democratic state senator and one of Mr. Jindal’s opponents, said recently. But such remarks do not seem to be catching on with voters apparently weary of bumbling at the Capitol in Baton Rouge and at City Hall in New Orleans.
Just better to keep the inept and intellectually challenged Democrats in office, eh, Senator Boasso? Does he even realize what a jerk that remark makes him sound like? Jindal has serious plans to clean things up in Louisiana - the Times points out that making things change in the corrupt Baton Rouge status quo is difficult. But if Boasso represents the quality of the people Jindal will be up against, I'd bet on some good changes.
By Quilly Mammoth, Saturday, 20 October , 2007 @ 1:41 pm
It is with great admiration that I note that you didn’t misspell Senator Bozo’s name one time.
By Maggie, Saturday, 20 October , 2007 @ 6:39 pm
I am a fan of Bobby Jindal … Not just because he’s got an (R) after his name, but because of what I saw in him following Katrina … He was down there with his people. He got his hands dirty, cried with them, and started the clean up with them. He deserves the governorship … and La. deserves a better chance than the democrat machine has given them all these decades in power down there.
Good luck, Bobby. And G-d speed!
By Sam L., Sunday, 21 October , 2007 @ 8:50 am
Gosh! No mention of the Mayor of New Orleans in the above story as a possible additional reason for Dem demoralization. Inquiring minds…wonder.