Governor Bobby Jindal Running for President

If you thought the Republican presidential field was already too large, Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal threw his hat into the ring on June 24th making him the 13th (? – I think!) official candidate to run for the Republican Party nomination for president.

I first blogged about Jindal in 2007 when he became the first ever Indian American ever to be elected governor of a  state. The first time I had ever seen Jindal interviewed on television, I was kind of shocked to see an Indian American with a Southern accent. In 2011, Jindal was re-elected in a landslide. However, these days, Jindal’s record and popularity in Louisiana is quite poor:

“A poll was released in Louisiana about a month ago that showed President Obama’s approval rating in the Pelican State is down to 42%. It didn’t come as too big of a surprise, of course – Louisiana is a deep-red state in the Deep South, and the president lost his re-election bid here by 17 points.

What was surprising, though, was that the same poll found that Obama was four points more popular in Louisiana than Gov. Bobby Jindal (R). Indeed, by some measures, Jindal is the single least popular governor in the United States.”

That’s pretty shocking. I wonder if Jindal actually thinks he has a chance of winning the nomination, let alone winning the general election. His record is pretty bad:

“Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is Louisiana’s first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction but whose popularity plummeted as the state struggled with a $1.6 billion shortfall, announced Wednesday that he is running for president in 2016. … The state has the seventh-highest unemployment rate and the third-highest poverty rate in the country. In February, Moody’s Investors Service, the credit-rating agency, revised the state’s financial outlook from stable to negative, citing its structural budget imbalance.”

But The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart has a take on one of Jindal’s release videos where he and his wife are telling their children that Bobby is running for president:

If Jindal’s kids aren’t even excited, how is any Republican or American in the general election going to be excited (of course, the kids are bit too young to really understand – but you get the point.)

In my lifetime though, I do hope to see a credible Asian American that I respect run for president and win!