Bobby Jindal – Culture Crusader? The GOP Still Doesn’t Get It

Step aside, Pat Buchanan:

Jindal focused on culture and family during a speech to an audience of 800 at a fundraiser for the socially conservative Iowa Family Policy Center.

“It all starts with family and builds outward from there,” said the first-term Jindal, who was making his first visit to Iowa. “As a parent, I’m acutely aware of the overall coarsening of our culture in many ways.”

The governor said technology such as television and the Internet are conduits for corrupting children, which he also believes is an issue agreed upon across party lines.

“As governor, I can’t censor anything or take away anyone’s freedom of speech – nor do I want to if I could,” he said, “but I can still control what my kids watch, what they hear and what they read.”

The governor also noted efforts in his home state of Louisiana to crack down on sexual predators.

The governor was not entirely successful in avoiding words on politics when he said “most voters” think the Republican Party has become one of “corruption in Washington.”

During a stop at the Rapid Recover Breakfast in Cedar Rapids earlier Saturday, Jindal said America’s culture is one of the things that makes it great, but warned that its music, art and constant streams of media and communication have often moved in the wrong direction.

“There are things we can do as private citizens working together to strengthen our society,” he said. “Our focus does not need to be on fixing the (Republican) party,” he said. “Our focus needs to be on how to fix America.”

As an Indian-American whose parents are from India, when I read about Bobby Jindal lamenting the “coarsening of our culture” because of TV and music, I’m not all that surprised, as my parents, as well as many elders in my culture, do not hesitate to rail against fowl language and explicitly sexual scenery in movies, TV, and music (although Gov. Jindal himself was born in the US, so wouldn’t he be a little more socially liberal?).  But in any case, from a political perspective there is still no reason to be surprised by this news.  The Republicans just got through an excruciatingly painful beating at the polls a few weeks ago, and what better way for them to recover than to return to fundamentals and take a sip from their fountain of youth: the culture wars, right?  For Mr. Jindal himself, talking to Iowa Republicans about social matters may be a smart way to position himself for 2012; don’t forget that Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses in the last cycle, beating back serious contender Mitt Romney, who outspent Huckabee by a margin of nearly 20 to 1, by appealing to Iowa’s tightly knit community of evangelicals, and home-schoolers in particular.  If Jindal wants to be taken seriously by the true believers of his party, who at this point are showing no signs of backing away despite this year’s losses, he’s got to milk them for support, and it starts with getting them to look away from his Indian heritage in a party of older white men, and earning the trust of the evangelical community.  The fact that Huckabee himself is also running around in Iowa and planting seeds for 2012 doesn’t exactly help Jindal, but he’s making his rounds now and making them early.

Now, Mr. Jindal may be playing the social issues card to his advantage, but the fact that someone as high-profile and as promising for the GOP as Bobby Jindal is trying to rally his troops into one more GOP-led culture war in 2012 is not good news for his party.  Now, I know Jindal has said in recent weeks that his party needs to become a party of ideas, but whether or not he will take that argument to the voters of his party seems to be at issue here.  To say that “our focus does not need to be on fixing the party,” as he said above, points to a serious misunderstanding on Jindal’s part of what exactly took place this past November 4.  For the last eight years, during which for the most part Republicans controlled every single branch of the federal government, they were given the chance to prove the primacy of their ideas on governing, and they utterly failed.  The economy has tanked.  Jobs are being lost left and right.  The public’s mood on Iraq has turned permanently sour, and the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is begging for attention before it’s too late.  With the results of their eight year experiment finally pouring in for everyone to see, the issue for their party right now, despite what Mr. Jindal says, is precisely to go back to the drawing board and give their brand a complete makeover, and yes, that involves personal admission of fault.  He’s exactly right when he says America needs to be fixed; this country faces serious economic and national security obstacles that threaten to derail any chances of attaining a future of peace and prosperity.  America is sick, but a call to arms for another culture war, even if it reinvigorates a despondent party, is not what the doctor ordered.  For the sake of his party, a woeful GOPer should pray that Jindal will lay down the culture arms soon and start truly rebuilding the Republican brand, one idea at a time.