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The Strengths and Weaknesses of Jindal as Romney’s Running Mate

Philip Klein makes the case for the new conservative favorite for the VP nomination: It is hard to predict who Mitt Romney will ultimately choose as his vice presidential running mate. But it is clear which pick would be the strongest: Louisiana’s Republican governor, Bobby Jindal. Jindal is certainly capable enough. He has some executive […]

Philip Klein makes the case for the new conservative favorite for the VP nomination:

It is hard to predict who Mitt Romney will ultimately choose as his vice presidential running mate. But it is clear which pick would be the strongest: Louisiana’s Republican governor, Bobby Jindal.

Jindal is certainly capable enough. He has some executive experience, and he seems to have done a fairly good job in Louisiana. He is reasonably familiar with national domestic issues from his short time in Congress, and he has been a health policy wonk for longer than many of other would-be running mates have been in politics. There’s no question that Jindal is one of the more impressive possible running mates available in terms of competence, at least as far as domestic issues are concerned.

The gaps that Jindal doesn’t fill very well are Romney’s gaps on foreign policy and national security. It helps Jindal that he was serving in the administration at HHS during the Iraq war debate and wasn’t in Congress until after the war had started. Whatever his views were and are, he doesn’t have any unfortunate pro-war votes that he will have to explain. One also searches in vain for evidence that Jindal has given much thought to foreign affairs beyond reciting ideological platitudes. His limited voting record in Congress doesn’t tell us much. Based on what he has said in relation to contemporary debates about the U.S. role in the world, he is unsurprisingly on the nationalist triumphalist bandwagon. As it says in his book Leadership and Crisis:

I am proud that America is exceptional. Global leadership is not a responsibility American can discard. It is a responsibility we must cherish. America is the hope of free peoples everywhere. Without American leadership the world around us would be more dangerous and less prosperous. The stronger America is, the safer the world is. We have a moral responsibility to make our country stronger and unashamedly export our ideals of freedom, democracy, and self-determination to all who would fulfill the divinely inspired potential of every living soul on this planet.

We can see from this and other passages later in the book that Jindal can recite hegemonist rhetoric chapter and verse just like Marco Rubio. As one would expect from a nationalist triumphalist, Jindal trots out the truncated Obama quote about American exceptionalism that Republicans have made a point of misrepresenting for years, and he pledges never to apologize for America. There is even a Scoop Jackson quote to make absolutely clear what sort of foreign policy vision Jindal embraces. He believes that the “real cause of war” in the world today is the existence of “authoritarian leaders trying to expand their power.” It doesn’t seem to matter that this has little relationship to the causes of many of the recent international conflicts over the last decade.

Jindal predictably boasts about all of the times that the U.S. has helped Muslim populations in his effort to answer criticisms of U.S. hegemony (and, yes, he includes Iraq on the list of countries that have been “helped”). He goes so far as to say that the U.S. has “done more for peace-loving Muslims than any other country on the planet.” That’s obviously untrue, and it’s the sort of silly triumphalist rhetoric that Romney already indulges in far too often. Amusingly, he refers to the current approach to national security as “therapeutic,” which is the last word I would choose to describe it. He seems to think that Obama spends a lot of time “empathizing” with enemy grievances, which he, Jindal, assures us he would never do. Not to be outdone by Rubio, Jindal gives a shout-out to the unwise “League of Democracies” idea favored by McCain as a substitute for the U.N. He writes, “Comprising only democracies, it would better reflect our values and better protect American security.” He doesn’t present any arguments to support the second claim.

It doesn’t seem that Jindal will be able to make up for Romney’s lack of experience and apparent lack of knowledge on foreign policy. If I were a Republican partisan, I would be extremely anxious about a foreign policy debate in which Jindal kept repeating these discredited talking points. It’s understandable that foreign policy wouldn’t be one of Jindal’s strengths, but it’s a significant lacuna that compounds one of Romney’s biggest weaknesses.

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