fairly excellent piece. of course, if mccain had picked him for VP, the obama campaign would be
running a whispering campaign saying that jindal had narrowly averted being recalled.
Bobby Jindal, All American
Being the youngest governor in the country, the first Indian-American governor in history, and the first nonwhite governor in Louisiana since Reconstruction are the least of the things that make Piyush Jindal different.
The thirty-seven-year-old Republican governor of Louisiana walked across the set of The Tonight Show with the bashful aplomb of a spelling-bee champion. The longish, spidery fingers of his right hand, often employed to tick off the points of a complex answer or multipart plan, were extended in anticipation of his first televised meeting with Jay Leno. Bobby Jindal's left hand was buried instinctively in the pants pocket of his navy-blue suit, waist 28, one size up from the boys' department, a delicate physiognomy inherited, along with his elfin ears and prominent nose, from his mother, Raj Gupta Jindal, a native of Punjab in northern India.
Raj was the daughter of a bank manager. She first came to America on a scholarship to study for her doctorate in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. She brought along her husband, a love match named Amar Jindal, himself the son of a shopkeep from the bania caste, the only one of the nine children in his family to attend school past fifth grade. At the time the couple immigrated, Raj was three months pregnant with their first son, Piyush. Though the university health plan denied coverage for the birth (it was ruled a "preexisting condition"), the one-month paid maternity leave was awarded as promised--that was the perk that had tipped the scales for Amar, who'd been hesitant to leave home, having worked his way up through the ranks to the respected position of assistant professor of engineering at Punjab University in Chandigarh, the newly dedicated capital city of their home state. At the age of four, according to family lore, precocious little Piyush Jindal would announce to his teacher and all of his friends in school in Baton Rouge--a town of politics and industry on the banks of the muddy Mississippi River--that he would heretofore be known as Bobby, after his favorite character on The Brady Bunch.
Illuminated by a bright follow-spot, accompanied by The Tonight Show band's funky rendition of Sly Stone's "Everyday People," the young governor made his way toward Leno. Jindal (pronounced Gin-dul) was nearing his one hundredth day as the first nonwhite governor of Louisiana since Reconstruction--the first-ever Asian Indian governor of any state. (That's the U. S. Census term for the 2.7 million descendants of the Indian subcontinent living in this country; those who were born in America call themselves South Asians or, more familiarly, desis.) After a mercurial first decade in public service, spent mostly beneath the radar--secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals at age twenty-four, high-level George W. Bush appointee at twenty-nine, U. S. congressman and House assistant majority whip at thirty-three--Jindal had lately been cast as a Republican answer to Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama. Dark skinned, highly intelligent, a harbinger of change, Jindal had been mentioned as a possible running mate for Republican presidential candidate John McCain--the reason for this visit to The Tonight Show.
Known variously as a "wunderkind technocrat," a "speed-talking policy wonk," a "problem solver, not a politician," a "credit to all South Asian--Americans," "the next Ronald Reagan" (Rush Limbaugh), a "guy who looks in the mirror and sees a white man," and a "scary, ultraconservative religious fanatic in cahoots with the Christian Right," Jindal in his first act as governor called two special sessions of Louisiana's part-time legislature. During those three heady weeks, Jindal fulfilled many of his campaign promises by pushing through dozens of new bills, including an overhaul of ethics laws, tax breaks designed to make the hurricane-ravaged state more attractive to businesses, and an income-tax deduction for parents whose children attend private schools. Crowed an editorial in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: He is "a youthful rising star who generates genuine excitement in a party that's been feeling awfully old and tired lately."
Jindal shook hands warmly with Leno and then turned around in his place before the guest chair and issued the fey little wave customary to politics. His rubbery lips formed a crooked smile, exposing his slightly bucked teeth, which seemed brilliant against the contrast of his skin. To use the argot of the Old South, Jindal's complexion is darker than a brown paper bag. At times--riding with him in his SUV on the way to a press conference in New Orleans to tout his new mental-health-care initiative; or in his helicopter, Pelican One, on the way to a press conference in Shreveport to tout a new workforce-training initiative; or behind his desk in his office in the breathtaking state capitol building, a thirty-four-story art deco monument built by Jindal's distant predecessor, Huey Long, the great populist and iconic corrupt politician whose body lies buried beneath a tall statue of himself in the gardens opposite the Mayan-temple-like entrance--I could have sworn that Jindal was wearing some kind of cover-up or cosmetic to soften his razor shadow, which is very dark, as if an artist had rendered his stubble in charcoal. Oddly, that did not seem to be the case tonight on Leno, as if Jindal had, for some reason, refused the customary television cosmetics, lending to his countenance a somewhat unfortunate Nixonesque swarthiness. Jindal's press secretary, Melissa Sellers, twenty-five, a blond-streaked journalism major from the University of Texas, denied that Jindal uses cover-up. A solid woman in high heels, quick on the draw with both her smile and her middle finger, Sellers had been recently derided by reporters for blocking access to her boss--literally--having performed a sort of perfectly executed moving pick that put the kibosh on any chance for spontaneous questions about the veep talk.
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