The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  Of course, all that had been before Jindal was tapped to deliver the Republicans’ official State of the Union response in 2009. Looking back on it now, the governor realized that speech could have been a big star-making moment for him. Instead it turned out to be a political self-detonation on live TV. He could still remember the sinking feeling he had while watching the pundits that night savage his performance as “amateurish,” and “sing song,” and “childish,” and “insane,” and…

  No. Jindal would not let himself dwell on that fateful screw-up. He had blown it, plain and simple. But he was determined now to reignite the enthusiasm he had inspired back when Republicans were still heralding him as their party’s answer to Barack Obama. To do so, he would reestablish himself as the intellectual leader of the GOP—and, consequently, a top tier 2016 presidential prospect.

  Jindal already knew he was the smartest guy in the party; he just needed to remind everybody else. Now if only he could get their attention.

  It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when Piyush Jindal became convinced of his own intellectual gifts. Did it happen in elementary school, when Mrs. Couvillion, a teacher most of his classmates couldn’t stand, launched a read-a-thon to raise money for the class and young Jindal devoured fifty-five books before his father, concerned about how much money he was going to have to donate, told his son, “No, no, stop reading. That’s enough. I’ll go buy you a prize instead”? Or was it later in his childhood, when he read in a biography of Abraham Lincoln that the sixteenth president was “inquisitive” and, upon looking up the definition of the word, smugly announced to his mother, who had grown tired of her son’s constant pestering, “President Lincoln was inquisitive and so am I. And you can’t be mad at me for doing what the president did”? It seems likely that the revelation occurred sometime after he precociously decided at the age of four that he was renaming himself after his favorite Brady Bunch character, Bobby—but probably before he racked up enough straight A report cards as a thirteen-year-old to land at an elite magnet high school in Baton Rouge.

  In any case, these are the stories that hold together the Approved Bobby Jindal Narrative, a self-portrait painted across scores of speeches, personal essays, and a memoir-slash-political manifesto, published in 2010 and titled Leadership and Crisis. The book, like so many others written by ambitious politicians looking to introduce themselves to the national electorate, is filled with a candor-like substance that resembles genuine introspection and insight, even though it was vetted by a team of political consultants. Coauthored by Curt Anderson, one of Jindal’s closest political advisers, Leadership and Crisis lists on its acknowledgments page a bevy of GOP consultants who gave him “input,” including his pollster.

  What’s revealing, then, isn’t the story itself, but how Jindal chose to tell it—primarily in a long string of anecdotes about how smart he is. This pattern, which persists throughout his autobiographical writing and rhetoric, is crystallized in the book: when he is aiming for self-deprecation, he jokes about his youthful participation in a math tournament (“Don’t laugh”); when he wants to illustrate his critique of America’s arrogant elites, he recounts stories from college of besting Ivy League liberals in intellectual debates (“a Baton Rouge education could hold its own”); and when he recounts the chronology of his career—from the Rhodes scholarship he wasn’t sure he wanted, to the McKinsey consulting job he fell into, to his ascent to the presidency of the University of Louisiana System at the age of twenty-seven—he does so with the casual self-regard of a brilliant man for whom life is a wild adventure of surprise successes.

  Jindal may have always been destined for such intellectual swagger. He was still in the womb when his parents, Amar and Raj, emigrated from India to the United States in 1971 so his mother could pursue a graduate degree in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. While Raj took classes, Amar took the bus to and from his job at the railroad, earning just enough money to work toward a normal middle-class life for his family and start putting cash away for his kids’ education. Amar, who had grown up in third world, stomach-aching poverty, instilled in his kids an immigrant’s appreciation for the opportunities America presented—and an insistence that they use every last ounce of their potential to attain the status and wealth that was available to them. In the Jindals’ modest neighborhood, where the only two-story houses belonged to doctors, Amar became convinced that Jindal should set his sights on medical school.

  With this goal fixed for him early on, Jindal spent his childhood working hard on his homework and excelling in class. He discovered that the work came much more easily to him than to other kids, and he eventually skipped a grade. But while his academic success pleased his parents, it wasn’t until he started high school that he found that his intellectual prowess could reap social rewards for him as well.

  Baton Rouge Magnet High School offered a unique setting for Jindal’s adolescence. The student population was largely made up of the children of LSU faculty, and its relative diversity helped insulate him from the racial tensions that gripped a state that was still grappling with desegregation. “It was a nice mix of people, many of whom had that family pressure of immigrants to succeed,” recalled Emilio Mayorga, a Nicaragua native who went to school with Jindal. At Baton Rouge High, the smart kids were the popular kids—and Jindal, the habitual hand raiser, the relentless curve ruiner, the terminal know-it-all, was one of the very smartest.

  It wasn’t long before his academic preeminence started attracting friends and admirers, and by the time he was old enough to join the advanced placement section—which doubled as the school’s cool kids clique—he was one of the most popular upperclassmen around, and a star student. When Elaine Parsons transferred to Baton Rouge High as a sophomore, one of the first people she met was Jindal, oozing self-assurance and eager to meet the new coed.

  Parsons remembered Jindal primarily as the popular, convivial president of Mu Alpha Theta (the cool math club; there were two). “We’re getting into pretty dorky territory here, but the math club was a big deal socially,” she said. “Our school was an academic magnet school with no major sports… so math club felt to me to be a rather cool thing to do. Most of the most competitive students were in it, and it’s where we often hung out before and sometimes after school.” By the time he graduated, Jindal had become president of so many clubs that the administration implemented a limit on how many extracurricular organizations a single student could helm at a time.

  Although Jindal later wrote in Leadership and Crisis, “I had never been a terribly political person in high school,” his classmates would remember him enthusiastically immersing himself in the culture of Reagan’s America. He idolized the fictional icons of eighties-era wealth and striving, like Michael J. Fox’s character, Alex P. Keaton, the high school Republican with hippie parents in television’s Family Ties, and the moneyed young investors depicted in the 1987 TV movie Billionaire Boys Club. He wore suits to school, sometimes accompanied by a bow tie with a dollar bill pattern, and carried a briefcase through the halls instead of a backpack. When Oliver Stone’s blockbuster movie Wall Street came out in 1987, Jindal memorized and frequently quoted from the triumphalist procapitalism speech that cutthroat investor Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, delivers to shareholders of a troubled paper company.

  “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” the teenage Jindal would say, doing his best Douglas impression. “Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

  According to former classmate Reagan Farr, Jindal was drawn to these figures not because he was a rabid ideologue, but because they embodied the only kind of American dream that truly appeals to a teenage son of middle-class immigrants: the potential to become extremely rich. “We just saw the lifestyle of these guys… and we all wanted to go out and make much
more money than our parents,” Farr said.

  On his birthday one year, Jindal arranged for himself and a group of friends to drive to New Orleans, where they spent the night cavorting on Bourbon Street, bobbing in and out of funky shops and jazz clubs, and getting apathetic bartenders to sell them liquor. “It was technically illegal to drink when you were a [teenager], but no one cared because it was a federal rule recently imposed on the state,” recalled Parsons, who accompanied Jindal on the trip. And so, in the name of his newfound federalist ideals, Jindal and his friends tipped back their glasses and swigged some of their first gulps of booze. In one club, a performer got word that the lanky brown kid was celebrating his birthday, and she brought him onstage to serenade him. His friends whooped and hollered along with the other revelers, and when it was over they spilled back out onto the cobblestoned streets in a state of joyful delirium.

  Jindal was nearing the end of his time in high school by then, and soon he would be off to Brown and then Oxford and eventually Washington, DC. But Baton Rouge High would stick with him as the place where he learned the real value of his superpowered brain. It wasn’t just that it could earn him good grades, or parental pats on the head, or maybe even, one day, the rich-enough-to-fly-your-own-jet, rich-enough-to-not-waste-time wealth that Gekko ranted about in Wall Street. More important than any of that, his brilliance could win him friends. It could make people like him.

  It was a lesson he would keep with him for the next two decades—until one day, all of a sudden, it began failing him miserably.

  In January 2013, Jindal got to work revamping his national profile as a brainy conservative policy maestro, beginning with a bold proposal in Louisiana to abolish state income taxes for corporations and individuals. That same month, he wrote an op-ed soberly outlining the ways in which Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion would burden state budgets and identifying several ways to reform the program. And as he toured the country, he spoke earnestly about the need for the Republican Party to recalibrate its economic message to emphasize increasing growth, rather than obsess over budget deficits.

  In Baton Rouge, Jindal’s young, wiry chief of staff, Timmy Teepell, worked around the clock to put legislative points on the board for the governor’s agenda. And in Washington, Jindal’s rumpled, sardonic media consultant, Curt Anderson, was busy talking up those policy victories—and the big ideas that powered them—with his network of high-powered comrades and insider contacts. But no one was biting.

  No matter how many serious-minded op-eds and policy speeches Jindal trotted out, the man who had once been anointed by the Republican smart set as heir to the party’s intellectual legacy was now barely making a ripple in the national conversation. He had been relegated to the sidelines while the think tankers, commentators, academicians, and politicians with Beltway zip codes got to drive the debate.

  The lack of interest depressed Jindal’s inner circle. “If you’re in Washington and you can get on the Senate floor, you’ll get covered by the national press corps if you say something racy or crazy enough,” Anderson grumbled to me. “Or if you’re in New Jersey and you want to get attention, you can go to Manhattan—if the bridge isn’t closed—and get on national TV.” After months of failing to make a national splash, one Jindal adviser glumly concluded, “I’m not sure that someone like Bobby gets enough attention to matter until he decides to get in the race.”

  But geography wasn’t Jindal’s only problem. For one thing, the governor’s big ideas were sinking him in his home state. By April, his bold tax proposal had become a political fiasco, with state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle revolting against Jindal’s plan to raise sales taxes in order to pay for the income tax cut. He was soon forced to withdraw the proposal, and just like that, what was supposed to be the signature policy achievement of his second term was dead. The next month, the school voucher program Jindal had implemented in his first term—already a deeply polarizing initiative in his state for diverting funds to religious charter schools that taught creationism—was found to be unconstitutional by the Louisiana Supreme Court. That spring, his approval rating sank to 38 percent.

  Meanwhile, at the national level, Jindal now found himself competing for attention in a crowded field of Republican hero-wonks. When he first came on the scene, his policy acumen was new and somewhat unique among ambitious conservative politicians. But since then, a herd of spreadsheet-wielding, white paper–writing Republicans had stampeded out of political obscurity, and were now dominating the debate over the party’s agenda. Paul Ryan had risen to political fame by authoring detailed, deficit-hacking federal budgets, and eventually climbed all the way to the GOP’s 2012 presidential ticket. Yuval Levin had launched National Affairs, a prestigious journal that published dense conservative policy tracts, and quickly earned prominent placement on coffee tables in GOP offices across Washington. Even Utah senator Mike Lee, viewed in many corners as a Tea Party rabble-rouser, was introducing thoughtful, serious legislation aimed at improving infrastructure and education. Policy wonkishness was now en vogue in the Republican Party—and Jindal had done little to significantly distinguish himself from the rest.

  Adding to Jindal’s problems was the fact that the neuroses of the GOP elites were no longer calibrated toward searching for an anti-Dubya standard-bearer. Whereas in 2009, the conventional wisdom was that Republicans needed a young, whip smart reformer to emerge and dispel the dumb-cowboy stereotypes that plagued the party, now GOP influentials were looking for an anti-Romney to rehabilitate the party’s image. In their view, Republicans had lost in 2012 because they were represented by a wealthy, awkward, Wall Street–manufactured automaton who shuffled around on “clean-cut, midcentury capitalist dad” setting, saying things like “Golly” and “Gee whiz” and “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” To counteract the damage Romney had done to the GOP’s brand, particularly in Middle America, many of the party’s leaders thought they should elevate politicians who were personally dynamic, charismatic, relatable—maybe even folksy. And Jindal was, at least the way he was marketing himself now, not one of those guys.

  In October, Jindal launched a policy group, America Next, that aimed to come up with innovative solutions to the country’s problems. The announcement made a minor splash in the DC trades, but the organization was quickly forgotten—consigned to spend untold years sending little-known academicians to poorly attended panels at conservative conferences.

  The longer the governor lumbered along unnoticed by the rest of the GOP, the more convinced he became that brains alone were not going to make him the leader of his party. In what seemed like a cry for partisan attention, Jindal penned a Politico op-ed in June 2013 titled “GOP Needs Action, Not Navel-Gazing,” in which he complained, rather abrasively, about all the self-analysis and soul-searching going on in his party since 2012.

  “It’s really getting embarrassing, all these public professions of feelings of inadequacy,” he wrote. “Every day it seems another jilted high-placed Republican in Washington is confessing to the voters, ‘It’s not you, it’s me… ’”

  In truth, Jindal was the one feeling jilted. He had spent months courting the respect and attention of those “high-placed Republicans,” chasing them with the hormone-drenched persistence of a teenage boy pursuing his first love—only to strike out again and again. As Jindal surveyed the GOP’s field of competing 2016 suitors, he concluded that to win back the affections of his party, brains alone wouldn’t be enough: he would need to pull off a grand romantic gesture—a public display of partisan heroics so gutsy and high-profile that conservatives would remember why they fell in love with him in the first place.

  And so, with a new plan in place, Team Jindal set out from Baton Rouge in search of a path back into the national limelight. Meanwhile, 1,100 miles away in Washington, one of the most spotlight-soaked stars in the GOP was about to get burned, and badly, by the glare.

  Chapter Eight

  Daddy Issues

  On July 9, 2013,
the Washington Free Beacon, a tenacious conservative news site with a knack for troublemaking, posted a story revealing that a staffer in Rand Paul’s office had spent years working as a neo-Confederate radio personality who went by the moniker “the Southern Avenger.” The site reported that Jack Hunter, who was now serving as the senator’s social media director in Washington, had been famous in his home state of South Carolina as a shock jock who donned a Confederate flag luchador mask and spouted off about how “a non–white majority America would simply cease to be America.” He had railed against the effects of Mexican immigration and, in one particularly unsettling rant, toasted Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, declaring that John Wilkes Booth’s “heart was in the right place.” To top it all off, he had also served as a local chairman in the League of the South, a fringe group that advocated for the secession of the Southern states.

  The story detonated the day’s political news cycle, and reporters sprayed the senator’s office with phone calls and emails seeking comment. Rand’s profile had been rising steadily for months now, and the press was no longer treating him like an entertaining sideshow. He was now an influential political force—the face of America’s libertarian ascent—and editors believed he deserved tough scrutiny.

  Rand’s ideological opponents in the GOP were recalibrating their strategies for dealing with him as well. The party’s neoconservative wing—which held that America should assert power and influence in the world through overwhelming military might, and prioritize national defense above virtually all else—saw Rand’s noninterventionist message gaining steam in the party, and believed it to be deeply dangerous. The story in the Free Beacon, a neocon outfit with ties to the movement’s leading thinker, Bill Kristol, was one early salvo in an amorphous but deliberate campaign to discredit Rand.