Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) was chosen to deliver the GOP response to President Obama’s address to congress tonight. He’s young, he’s arguably more cool than Fred Thompson and he’s measurably less white – which is obviously all that the surviving Republican leadership has learned from recent political events – so he was the obvious choice as the GOP’s answer to Obama.
His challenge was to follow an inspirational speech delivered by a popular president during a time of great national stress and not sound like a total Buzz Killington.
Nice try, Gov. Jindal. Thanks for coming out – but you can go home, now.
For the first half of the speech I wasn’t sure where the Governor was going. He seemed to be kind of repeating the president’s speech, just in a “talking to a class of first-grader’s” tone of voice rather than that “leader of the world” tenor that President Obama managed to strike.
He used the destruction of New Orleans to make his points about why the public should embrace the GOP. I’m still a little too stunned by that approach to comment on it, so I leave that for the reader to ponder.
Then the talons came out:
You elected Republicans to champion limited government, fiscal discipline, and personal responsibility. Instead, Republicans went along with earmarks and big government spending in Washington. Republicans lost your trust – and rightly so.
Oooo! You so told, um, You! Don’t let you give you any guff about it, either. You just tell you where you get off. You, um, betcha!
hmmm…
Speaking of irrelevant Republican Governors, as an attempt at the kind of “gotcha politics” so recently frowned on by an Alaskan Governor whose name is rapidly fading from memory, Gov. Jindal pulled a line of the president’s to use as a red flag:
“A few weeks ago, the President warned that our nation is facing a crisis that he said ‘we may not be able to reverse.’ Our troubles are real, to be sure. But don’t let anyone tell you that we cannot recover – or that America’s best days are behind her.”
Now, if that didn’t completely miss what the President Obama had just finished saying – and if it wasn’t delivered like you suspected the viewers at home to be illiterate tundra farmers with bilateral frostbite – there might have been a bit of sting in that. But as it was it left me wanting to help Gov. Jindal back to his room and making sure he got the kind of understanding care that would help him adjust to life outside the Institute, someday…
The President’s speech hit the press at 3pm this afternoon, Governor. You could have read it before writing your response, or failing that you could have watched it before delivering your own. And if you did both of those things, and still delivered the speech you did? In that case I suggest you stay inside and play with the Nice Colored Blocks while the big kids get back to running the nation.
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