BATON ROUGE – As his increasingly hopeless campaign for the Republican presidential nomination thrashes toward its inevitable, pitiful close, Gov. Bobby Jindal is growing increasingly desperate for attention and relevance. Taking a cue from his cohort Sen. David Vitter, who resorted to picking fights with New Orleans to distract from his own falling poll numbers, Jindal used the city’s commemoration of Katrina and the levee failures as a pretext for demagoguing on environmental issues.
Jindal’s transparent bid for relevance is yet another instance of the governor putting politics ahead of people, cynically exploiting the still-raw scars of Katrina for negligible political advantage. Despite his ongoing dependence on campaign welfare and his serial abuse of his privileges as governor, Jindal’s campaign continues to slip from also-ran to never-was. Experts from across the political spectrum have now thoroughly dismissed his chances, and debunked every justification for Jindal’s failed vanity campaign. In that light, Jindal’s decision to exploit this week’s memorials for his own gain represents the most craven, cynical excess of a political careerist nearing the end of his ambitions.
“There is not a path to victory for Bobby Jindal in Iowa, and there never was,” said Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, chairwoman of the Louisiana Democratic Party. “As that reality on the ground becomes inescapable, it’s no real surprise that he would lash out at our president. But hiding behind this week’s memorial as an excuse is a new low, even for him.
“It’d be sad if it weren’t so predictable.”
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