Bobby Jindal Wins
Some sense has come to Louisiana:
U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal won the Louisiana governor’s race Saturday, becoming the nation’s youngest governor and the first non-white to hold the state’s post since Reconstruction.
Jindal, the Republican 36-year-old son of Indian immigrants, carried more than half the vote against 11 opponents. With about 92 percent of the vote in, Jindal had 53 percent with 625,036 votes — more than enough to win outright and avoid a Nov. 17 runoff.
“Let’s give our homeland, the great state of Louisiana, a fresh start,” Jindal said to cheers and applause from a crowd that began chanting his name at his victory party.
His nearest competitors: Democrat Walter Boasso with 208,690 votes or 18 percent; Independent John Georges had 1167,477 votes or 14 percent; Democrat Foster Campbell had 151,101 or 13 percent. Eight candidates divided the rest.
“I’m asking all of our supporters to get behind our new governor,” Georges said in a concession speech.
The Oxford-educated Jindal had lost the governor’s race four years ago to Gov. Kathleen Blanco. He won a congressional seat in conservative suburban New Orleans a year later but was widely believed to have his eye on the governor’s mansion.
Erick Erickson takes this personally and in a good way:
I cannot really express what this means to me.
It’s like how the exiled English felt when Mary I died and Elizabeth was crowned. It was safe to go home again.
If you don’t live in Louisiana, you have no clue what it is like. You may think you do, but you don’t. You make think your state sucks, but it doesn’t really compared to Louisiana. Louisiana sucks in a way that is soul killing because it is such a wonderful, beautiful, wonderful place, and yet it is so dysfunctional it saps and taxes (quite literally, they tax everything there) your talent and your energy and you leave if you can, like I did.
Think of the United States if Reagan had claimed victory after 200 years of Carter, instead of just 4. That’s what this is like. That’s the closest equivalent.
It’s safe to go home now. Freedom stirs.
Before winning Jindal was a rising star. If he can wrangle significant accomplishments in the messy world of Louisiana politics he will become the one to watch on the national level. Ed Morrissey writes,
If he can clean up Louisiana and return New Orleans to health and safety, Jindal may get a lot more attention in eight years as a Republican candidate for the White House — and at 44, he could electrify conservative politics in 2015.
Exactly. Now for him, the really hard work begins.
“Indian Immigrants’ Son New La. Governor”
