Some of Rubio’s advisers came to believe that racial stereotypes were part of what made the speculation so persistent. “He’s Cuban and he’s from Miami, so of course he has mistresses,” Sullivan once grumbled sarcastically to a colleague.
Still, most in the Rubio camp had trouble believing that Jeb would personally green-light such a brazen campaign of character assassination against someone who he had, just four years earlier, joyously introduced to the world while choking back tears (or at least pretending to). But one of the privileges of being Prince Jeb was his ability to give an order and then step back in blissful ignorance as a team of duty-bound lieutenants plotted, and strategized, and worked out all the gritty details that entailed “carrying the message.”
As for Rubio, he found himself back where he always ended up: restless, and fidgeting, and bouncing on the balls of his feet as he impatiently waited for the bang of the starting gun. Maybe it really was crazy to give up his Senate seat and risk his whole career on an underdog bid against the Jeb Bush juggernaut. But he had only gotten this far on the power of perpetual forward motion. And he wasn’t going to stop moving now.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Crusade
Standing at the center of the vast Louisiana State basketball arena, Bobby Jindal gazed out at the thousands of evangelicals who had gathered for his January 2015 prayer rally, and he began to tell a story he was now an expert at recounting: the dramatic tale of his conversion to Christianity. He paced the stage like a practiced megachurch preacher, pouring his personal journey of faith into the headset mic and brandishing a brown leather Bible above his head for moments of emphasis.
He didn’t tell the whole story, of course. The late-night exorcism didn’t come up, and there was no mention of Opus Dei sparking a controversial wave of Catholic fervor at Brown. But this version of the story was not intended to be footnoted and fact-checked; it was devotional in nature—meant to inspire and motivate and speak to the soul. And Jindal was nailing it.
The Christians in the crowd leapt to their feet repeatedly throughout his sermon, lifting their hands to the heavens and cheering in ecstasy. And when he finished his story, he pleaded with them to pray for America and her president.
“We can’t just elect a candidate to fix what ails our country,” Jindal told them. “We can’t just pass a law and fix what ails our country. We need a spiritual revival to fix what ails our country!”
Back in 2003, Jindal had not yet fully discovered the potent political power of his conversion story. He was thirty-two years old and staring down the first true defeat of his life. His entrance into the Louisiana gubernatorial race earlier that year had been audacious—he could admit that much—and his unlikely surge in the polls, enabling him to emerge as the Republican candidate in the runoff, counted as a remarkable political achievement for someone so young and electorally inexperienced. But Jindal wanted more—he felt called to more. He had prayed and pondered and talked it over endlessly with political aides and spiritual advisers, and he felt quite sure he was destined for the governorship. He was having trouble, however, convincing the voters.
More precisely, he was failing to connect with the white, conservative, Christian men—affectionately termed “bubbas”—in Louisiana’s rural parishes. These voters had supported a long line of gubernatorial good ol’ boys over the course of the Bayou State’s political history, and many of them viewed the upcoming November election as a choice between Kathleen Blanco, a well-known lieutenant governor with a record as a conservative Democrat, and, well… the brown-skinned fella.
Jindal had spent years indignantly defending his home state against allegations of racism from the northern Yankee elites with whom he often traveled, insisting that he had never encountered such prejudices while growing up in Baton Rouge. Even now, as pundits speculated about how his ethnicity might hold him back in the election—noting that only twelve years earlier, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had captured a majority of the state’s white vote—Jindal refused to entertain the notion. Whenever a reporter asked him about how the racial dynamic might sway the race, he insisted, “The voters of Louisiana are going to vote for the best candidate. It doesn’t matter whether they are black, white, red, or blue. We are all red, white, and blue. We are all Americans!”
And yet.
Jindal’s campaign team always knew his ethnicity might be a problem. And sure enough, the campaign’s internal research showed that the bubbas tended to view Jindal as a suspicious, unfamiliar outsider who should be treated with skepticism. No matter how hard Jindal campaigned, nothing—not his glittering academic pedigree, or his record at the helm of the state’s higher education system, or his recent post in George W. Bush’s cabinet, or his eighteen-point economic plan, or the Southern drawl he had mysteriously picked up in between his last C-SPAN appearance in Washington and his first stump speech in Louisiana—could change that.
Which is why the unexpected phone call Jindal received one morning at his campaign headquarters seemed at least a little bit like divine providence.
“Bobby? It’s Todd Hinkie!”
Jindal hadn’t spoken to his youth pastor since he walked out of The Chapel on the Campus as a teenager fifteen years earlier. Hinkie had learned of his spiritual protégé’s political career when he saw news of the campaign on TV. “How the heck are you running for governor of Louisiana?” he cheerfully demanded.
The two men spent some time on the phone catching up. Hinkie, who now lived in Texas, talked about life as a full-time minister, and Jindal briefly recounted his conversion to Catholicism and his meteoric rise in politics—including a lament that he was having trouble convincing that state’s conservative Christian voters that he was one of them. Eventually, they wished each other well, promised to stay in touch, and hung up.
But over the next couple of days, Hinkie couldn’t get the campaign off his mind. As the pastor who had introduced Jindal to the Bible, he was better acquainted than anyone with the sincerity of the candidate’s faith, and it bothered him that voters seemed to think it was an act. Wondering if there was some way he could help, he called up Timmy Teepell, an old friend from his Baton Rouge days.
Teepell had grown up attending the youth group Hinkie led, and was now working at the Republican National Committee, in Washington. The two had kept in touch over the years, and Hinkie thought Teepell might have some insight into the governor’s race. As it turned out, Teepell had actually interviewed to be Jindal’s campaign manager. (Though he didn’t know the candidate personally, they had many mutual friends. In fact, Teepell’s mother had helped organize the church musical that first piqued Jindal’s interest in Christianity.) Teepell didn’t end up getting the gig on the Jindal campaign, but now his old youth group leader was on the phone asking for his help—and he seemed pretty worked up about getting this guy elected.
“I know his faith is real. I know it. But Bobby told me, according to the polls, [that] the Christians in Louisiana aren’t getting it. They don’t understand that he’s their man,” Hinkie testified. “How could I help him?”
Teepell said he’d think and pray on it, and they hung up.
A couple of days later, inspiration struck. Teepell called Hinkie back with an idea: why not turn Jindal’s conversion into an Internet chain letter?
“I think you ought to just write the story [of his conversion] down and email it to every Christian you know in Louisiana,” Teepell proposed. “Tell them to forward it and say how they know you, like, ‘Hey, this is my kid’s youth pastor, look what he says about this guy running for governor.’ Send.” Teepell acknowledged that, in the grand tradition of AOL-era, copy-tweak-and-paste chain emails, “by the time it’s forwarded five or six times, it’ll be urban myth. But by then you’ll have the whole state of Louisiana.”
So Hinkie went to work typing up the whole story—from Jindal’s visceral reaction to The Jesus Film all those years ago, to his insatiable appetite for reading assignments in the Bi
ble, to his climactic teenage conversion. After getting approval from the campaign and sending the story to an English teacher he knew for proofreading, Hinkie blasted it out to his network of Louisiana Christians, and said a quiet prayer that his testimony might have some effect.
The response was overwhelming. The email went viral almost instantaneously, spreading like holy fire across Louisiana, leaping over borders into inboxes in Texas and Mississippi, and setting Bible studies and Rotary Club meetings ablaze with talk of this brave young man who had found the Lord and was now working to become governor.
“My voice mail was completely full. I had emails coming in from everywhere,” Hinkie recalled. “I had people coming up to me at church in Texas and saying, ‘My mother-in-law in Shreveport got your email,’ and ‘If I get your stinkin’ email one more time… ’”
Jindal was seeing results as well. The spread of the Hinkie email corresponded with an eleventh-hour push by the Jindal campaign to get the bubbas on board, and their efforts seemed to be paying off. Internal polling showed conservative Christians and rural voters coming around to Jindal the more they heard about his faith and his pure-right positions on social issues.
“Todd, it worked!” the candidate told Hinkie as the race tightened. “My numbers are shooting up, and it’s all because of the Christian voters. They’re getting it!” Hinkie was quick to credit Teepell—the operative Jindal had passed up to run his campaign—for the idea.
As the too-close-to-call election came to a conclusion, Jindal was consumed with the confidence of the foreordained. “Bubbas for Bobby” bumper stickers were sprouting up across the state. He had a narrow lead in the polls, and he felt the momentum at his back. Everything was coming together just as he knew it would. Destiny was unfolding.
But then the polls closed—and the final tally proved stubbornly resistant to destiny. Jindal came up just shy of victory, winning 48 percent of the vote, compared with Kathleen Blanco’s 52 percent. Watching from a hotel suite as the returns came in, Jindal was crushed—not just because he had lost a tight race, but because he felt God’s will had somehow been thwarted.
He would later tell Hinkie that the hardest part of that night wasn’t going down to the ballroom full of cameras and conceding the election to Blanco; it was kneeling down with his wife, Supriya, just before his public concession speech and “conceding the election to the Lord.”
“I don’t get it,” Jindal told God in his election night prayer. “I don’t understand. But I trust you.”
A few days later, when the dust had settled, Jindal headed to the woods for a personal retreat, bringing along a Bible, an empty journal, and a copy of Rick Warren’s devotional self-help book The Purpose Driven Life. He needed time to process the loss and figure out what God wanted him to do next.
When Jindal returned, he knew exactly what he needed to do. First he called up Teepell and asked him to run his campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives. Next he went to work scheduling appearances at every church in rural Louisiana that would take him. He thought the good Christians in his state might like to hear him give fervent, passionate testimony about how he came to accept Jesus as his personal savior.
A few feet outside the arena where Jindal and his spiritual warriors had gathered for the 2015 rally, protesters were calling the event’s sponsors a “hate group” and demanding that the gay-haters leave their school. But within, Jindal had captivated his audience, telling them they were reliving the great rallies of evangelical legend Billy Graham, who used to assemble tens of thousands of believers for events like this one, including at this very school in 1970. Graham’s campaign for a widespread spiritual revival in America had preceded a grassroots political movement of Christian conservatives—christened the Moral Majority by Jerry Falwell—that went on to serve as the backbone of the Republican Party for decades.
Times had changed since the days of Graham and Falwell. Even in the decade that had passed since Jindal’s first gubernatorial bid, the influence of the religious Right within the GOP had actually declined dramatically. Though the movement remained a potent force in sections of the South and Midwest, its numbers were diminished and its agenda was more unpopular than ever.
And yet as the 2016 race neared, a curious phenomenon began to manifest itself in the Republican presidential field. One after another, candidates emerged to deliver pulpit-pounding sermons about morality, and family values, and preserving America’s Christian heritage—and soon there were no fewer than half a dozen conservative contenders preaching directly to the same shrinking choir.
Typically, in a national GOP primary there would be one or two candidates who ran explicitly as religious culture warriors—and they almost never lasted far beyond Iowa. Even at the height of the Moral Majority’s influence, the Republican Party had nominated Ronald Reagan—a Hollywood-trained governor who was about as overtly godless as a national politician could get in the eighties. (Reagan admitted in a debate during his reelection bid that he hadn’t attended church once during his first term in the White House.)
But the unique dynamics of the 2016 cycle had helped to create a stampede of conservative Christians. With the advance of gay rights—and the insistence of the party’s moderate establishment that they evolve with the rest of the country—the denizens of the religious Right had come to feel increasingly estranged, and yearned for a standard-bearer who unapologetically spoke to their issues. Meanwhile, for those candidates looking to carve out a niche in an uncommonly crowded field, the evangelical vote was an obvious choice. They held tremendous sway in the almighty Iowa caucuses, and a dark horse who didn’t have millionaires on his speed dial could still have a shot at victory there if he managed to rally the believers.
And so 2015 saw a surge of culture warriors charging into the fray, each with his own slightly altered spin on social conservatism.
There was Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who had made his name as a pro-life, antigay crusader and was now trying to reinvent his social conservatism in a way that supported a “pro-family” economic agenda. He wrote a book titled Blue Collar Conservatives and toured the country talking about turning the GOP into “the party of the worker.”
Ted Cruz, meanwhile, was tailoring his pitch to Christians with his characteristically high-octane theatrics. In the summer of 2014, Houston’s first openly gay mayor, Annise Parker, had entangled herself in a battle over antidiscrimination legislation that conservative churches opposed on the grounds that it might coerce them into letting transgender men into women’s bathrooms. The pitched legal battle culminated in a wide-ranging set of subpoenas from the mayor’s legal team that demanded the pastors turn over the texts of all sermons they had delivered in relation to the dispute—a controversial maneuver that immediately earned the ire of conservative Christians across the country. Cruz saw an opportunity.
The Texas senator dove into the fray, calling the mayor’s behavior “shocking and shameful,” “un-American,” and an “assault against religious liberty.” He linked arms with conservative leaders like Glenn Beck, Erick Erickson, and Mike Huckabee, and urged patriots everywhere to ship their Bibles and other religious books to the Houston mayor’s office. By the end of October, she had received more than a thousand Bibles, and Cruz was receiving accolades from the religious Right. But the debate over religious freedom laws continued to rage, sharply polarizing Americans and pigeonholing Republicans who endorsed them as conservative culture warriors.
In January 2015, Huckabee left his Fox News show to officially explore a presidential bid of his own. Seven years earlier, in 2008, his campaign had unexpectedly caught fire as conservative Christians rallied to his underdog candidacy with the fervor of the anointed, consumed with the need to save their party and country from the twin evils of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and John McCain’s moderation. Ever since then, Huckabee had earned a nice living as a pundit preaching Christian values, and some wondered whether his 2016 waters testing was simply an effort to wi
den his audience with national buzz. But his rhetoric didn’t go over as well with the rest of the country. In one episode, he tried picking a fight with Beyoncé, calling her music “obnoxious and toxic mental poison” and casting her husband, Jay-Z, as a “pimp” who was “exploiting his wife as a sex object.” As it turned out, the onetime minister had somewhat overestimated the number of Americans scandalized by the beloved diva’s dance moves, and while Huckabee became a laughingstock in the media, many in his own party quietly cringed.
As Rick Perry tried to stoke excitement for a 2016 campaign of his own, the former Texas governor painted his Christian conservatism as part of a general Lone Star State lifestyle he believed would appeal to the party’s national base. In the spring of 2014, he traveled to the historic waters of Little Rocky Creek in Washington County, Texas, where Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas, had been baptized 160 years before. Next to the fields of blooming pink and yellow wildflowers, and surrounded by a small group of friends and family, Perry immersed himself in the waters to renew his baptism. After drying off, he visited the local church and played a hymn on the organ. With his faith revived, he spent much of the next year refining his speeches in Iowa and talking about Christian values.
The Wilderness Page 37