Bobby Jindal, striving for a breakthrough of his own, looked out over the sea of seersuckers that had convened in Columbia for the annual Silver Elephant Dinner on June 6, 2014. He knew what he had to do. The field of likely GOP presidential candidates was ballooning. Beltway pundits were floating new prospects every day, and would-be contenders were coming out of the woodwork. (Carly Fiorina? Really?) To stay relevant, Jindal needed to seize every chance he got to make a splash—and here at the South Carolina Republican Party’s biggest fund-raiser of the year, the pressure was on.
Jindal had forty-five minutes to earn his keep as the event’s headliner, and he did not intend to waste it on caveats or carefully worded hedging. This wasn’t the venue to try out some new stuff he had been working on in the studio; it was an audience of liquored-up donors looking to have a good time on a Friday night, and they wanted to clap along to the greatest hits.
Jindal was happy to oblige.
He started the set with a catchy single: “I think President Obama should sue Harvard Law School to get his tuition back. I’m not sure what he learned!”
Laughter.
Then, an oldie but a goodie: “You may remember that this is a president who, when he was campaigning in California, accused the country of clinging to our guns and religion.” Pause, smirk. “Now, I know that was supposed to be an insult, but as the governor of Louisiana, I’m proud to report to you that we’ve got plenty of guns and religion!”
Hoots, hollers.
Finally, an anthem of outrage that was burning up the charts just this week, as news broke that the Obama administration had given up five Taliban prisoners in exchange for the release of a disillusioned U.S. soldier named Bowe Bergdahl: “Apparently, our president has adopted a catch-and-release policy toward terrorists.” Then, inviting the audience to sing along with the chorus: “I’ve got three simple questions for you.
“Do you think it makes sense for the president of the United States to be negotiating with terrorists?”
No! came the response from the veterans and military moms looking up from their plates.
“Do you think it makes sense for the president of the United States to have the unilateral right to simply break and ignore American law whenever he chooses?”
No! bellowed the portly job creators and women in pearls.
“Do you think it makes sense for the president of the United States to release five Taliban members who may make it their lives’ mission to attack not only Americans but our way of life, our values, what we believe in—does it make sense for the president of the United States to let these terrorists go?”
No! yelled the freedom-loving South Carolinians who would soon leave this ballroom and tell their friends and neighbors to keep an eye out for that Jindal fella because he sure seems to know what he’s talking about.
By the end of the performance, the audience was on their feet, showering Jindal with validation. This new rhetorical approach of his—less bookish, nerdy, and earnest; more noisy, caustic, and sharply partisan—was a welcome transformation.
Twenty-two years earlier, Bobby Jindal—the stick-skinny Indian American kid sporting an oversize suit and a part in the middle of his hair—stood at the head of an august lecture hall on Oxford’s centuries-old campus and started to talk. He had a forceful, high-velocity style of speaking that caused consonants to bang into each other, frequently damaging the words beyond recognition. But it wasn’t long before the students in the audience realized what their classmate was up to: Bobby Jindal, all of twenty-two years old and a recently enrolled Rhodes scholar, was telling the world famous political theorist seated in the front row that he was wrong about everything.
At the start of the semester, Jindal had been the first to raise his hand when the professor, Ronald Dworkin, asked for volunteers to give class presentations. It wasn’t until Jindal went to the library after class that he discovered Dworkin was one of the most influential legal philosophers of his generation. Jindal spent hours perched at a quiet desk surrounded by towering bookshelves as he pored over Dworkin’s work. The more he read, the more he found to disagree with. The theory for which his professor was most famous contended that human rights were guaranteed by a “seamless web” of legal principles and precedent, that every question had one “right answer” that could be determined by examining the constellation of contracts that man has created over the centuries. Jindal thought that Dworkin was giving credit for the moral framework that governed humanity to a bunch of judges, scholars, and lawmakers, rather than acknowledging the fact that morality was absolute, objective, and God-given.
Deciding to say so in front of his entire class was more than a routine flourish of grad student bravado. Jindal had little academic training in political philosophy, having spent his undergraduate years at Brown diagramming prokaryotic cells and studying regulatory models for health insurance subsidies. But his personal study of Catholicism had led him to read legions of theologians and conservative philosophers, and he had built for himself a uniquely well-informed, scholarly orthodoxy. Inasmuch as he experienced ideas that challenged his worldview, it was typically through the eyes of Aquinas and Hayek, or in feisty dorm room debates in which the only goal was to win. It was in this spirit that Jindal set about outlining his arguments against Dworkin’s philosophy, using health-care policy as his frame because he was familiar with the material.
When the day of the presentation arrived, Jindal stood before the class and vigorously made his case. His central thesis was that a righteous health-care system could succeed only if it was based on the religious principle of “human dignity,” and would fail if it relied solely on the “neutral” liberal values outlined by Dworkin.
Jindal held forth for the better part of an hour, delineating the myriad ways in which Dworkin’s thinking was misguided. It wasn’t until he concluded his presentation and saw that his classmates were sitting in stunned silence that he realized he may have committed a faux pas. For several excruciating moments, nobody made a sound. “You could hear a pin drop,” he later recalled.
Finally, Dworkin dismissed the class, but before Jindal could slip away, the professor pulled him aside. Jindal braced himself for a reprimand. Instead, Dworkin asked if he would join him for lunch. He had been impressed by his student’s arguments—and his intellectual guts—and he wanted to talk about recruiting him to assist with research for his next book.
A couple of decades later, in Leadership and Crisis, Jindal would cheerfully gloss over what happened next. “It turned out [Dworkin] was writing a book on health care and asked me to help him,” he wrote. “It was a great learning experience, and while we never managed to agree on the issue, it was a wonderful opportunity to debate important ideas and policies, policies I’m still dealing with today.”
But Jindal’s relationship with the professor had a far more profound impact on the way he thought—and his approach to public policy—than he was willing to let on in a political memoir. Dworkin, a rakish, bespectacled superstar of the academy well-known for his wit and verve, took an interest in Jindal after his audacious class presentation, and the young student was soon pulled with unbending gravitational force into his orbit.
The project for which Dworkin enlisted Jindal’s help was not so much “a book on health care” as it was an enormously controversial and ambitious attempt by the liberal icon to reframe the charged public debate over abortion and euthanasia. Jindal spent months engaged in heady meetings at the professor’s office, providing research and talking through everything from American health policy to the Catholic catechism. Under Dworkin’s tutelage, Jindal was cast into a deep and vast sea of ideas that he had previously experienced only as he sliced through them in the high-powered vessel of orthodoxy.
The eventual result of Jindal’s research was Life’s Dominion, published in 1993, in which Dworkin argues that the pro-life and pro-choice camps are not actually ideological enemies, and that a proper examination of their positions reveals that they share the same values, both viewing human life as an “intrinsic” good. To get there, Dworkin reaches a number of conclusions that would rile any group of Christian conservatives, including a rather patronizing premise that, no matter what pro-life advocates might say, they can’t possibly believe that a fetus is a human being with the same “right to life” as a born child because many of them still support abortion rights in cases of rape and incest. The book made a splash in the United States, earning rave reviews from the likes of Susan Sontag and Joan Didion and many heated takedowns from Christian intellectuals. The venerable conservative Catholic journal First Things skewered Life’s Dominion, listing among its many complaints that “the position of the Catholic Church… is so misrepresented by Dworkin as to be almost unrecognizable.” Had Jindal known his presidential aspirations might one day hinge on his popularity among Duck Dynasty viewers, he might have asked the professor to keep his name off the acknowledgments page.
Jindal never did come around to Dworkin’s philosophical worldview, but the professor’s fingerprints were left all over the master’s thesis he wrote before graduating. Titled “A Needs-Based Approach to Health Care,” the 187-page document—which would remain tucked away in Oxford’s library for decades, largely forgotten and unread, until I came across it—was laced with Dworkin’s terminology even as it argued from an opposing philosophical standpoint: while Dworkin believed that health-care resources should be allocated according to human rights derived from man-made law, Jindal argued that only a societal belief in “human dignity”—detached from the law, and probably born of the Creator—could drive a just health-care system.
More revealing than the specifics of the philosophical debate, though, was the sophistication on display in Jindal’s discussion of justice and equality—a depth he had achieved, in large part, while studying under Dworkin. Indeed, Jindal had come a long way since reciting Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” speech as a high school conservative.
All cohorts benefit from the contributions of past generations and create a wealth of resources and ideas which benefit future generations… However, each individual is not in an immediately reciprocal relationship with society. The argument that each individual must receive benefits from society equal to his contributions contradicts the policy suggested here and the underlying principles…
Though rationing is necessary to control overall expenditures, human dignity invests individuals with inviolable rights which cannot be trumped by such considerations… Regardless of economic contributions, all humans have a right to adequate housing, food, clothing, and health care.
As a devout Catholic, Jindal’s arguments for a robust social safety net are not entirely surprising, but this rhetoric would likely sound alarm bells among the right wing he found himself courting ahead of 2016. Even more striking, in the final pages of his thesis Jindal outlined some proposed health-care policies he believed would help guarantee a more just system.
The government could require every American to purchase long-term and catastrophic health-care insurance to provide for overwhelming needs, such as chronic illness and nursing home expenses. A federal regulatory board would operationalize the efficacy requirement, i.e., indicate when particular treatments must receive funding. Both premiums and extent of coverage would vary according to an individual’s income and needs; the government would subsidize premiums so that every individual could afford the necessary coverage. Young adults and the wealthy would pay more for their coverage than they would receive in benefits; the elderly and the poor would receive more in benefits than they paid in coverage. Obviously, premiums would not fluctuate with age or health and would thus be based on community, instead of experiential, rates; insurance companies would be obligated to issue and renew coverage, regardless of preexisting conditions.
While some of these ideas were kicking around right-leaning think tanks at the time, the basic contours of the policies Jindal was proposing—a personal health insurance mandate, a government regulatory board that decided which treatments should be subsidized, the preexisting conditions clause—would later become anathema to conservatives in the Obamacare era.
Jindal didn’t know it at the time, but his months at Oxford set him on a collision course of conscience. Under Dworkin, he had gone from being a smart kid who wielded his intellect like a weapon to a genuinely thoughtful student of ideas—not without convictions, but willing to submit them to interesting challenges from all quarters of the intellectual world. He came to love working alongside ideological adversaries, and he developed a deep appreciation for nuance. But he also decided he was destined for a life in politics. He found his personal ambitions shifting away from practicing medicine and towards policy making, reasoning that he would be able to help millions in government as opposed to treating sick people one by one.
Compared to the many aspiring officeholders who populated Oxford while he was there, Jindal seemed like an unlikely political prospect. Whereas his self-confidence manifested itself in more bookish pursuits, his fellow Rhodes scholar Cory Booker, for example, oozed candidate-like charisma, strutting around campus with his arm around a rotating cast of pretty coeds. (When the unmarried Booker later faced gay rumors as he ran for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, Jindal was skeptical. “If that’s true,” he would later joke, “then he had a lot of beards. He was really overcompensating.”)
But Jindal was just as ambitious as anyone, and when the time came decades later for him to overhaul his personality in pursuit of the presidency, he wouldn’t hesitate.
The new and improved—and nosier—Bobby Jindal of 2014 was the product of months of behind-the-scenes deliberation among his advisers. Shortly after the Duck Dynasty episode, with Jindal riding a wave of populist glory, his team decided it was time to punch up the governor’s rhetoric—but how?
To those who worked with him, it was no secret that beneath Jindal’s wholesome, well-mannered earnestness was a barbed wit that he was liable to swing at you in moments of frustration or boredom, or even just for his own amusement. “If you start trading insults with him, it’s not gonna go well for you,” one close adviser said. Everyone on Jindal’s team had a story about falling victim to one of his acerbic put-downs. Once, when he was visiting the Old Town Alexandria offices of Curt Anderson’s consulting firm, OnMessage, he noticed that the shelves of industry awards on display included one for the radio ads the firm had produced during his failed 2003 gubernatorial campaign. “Oh, that’s nice,” Jindal murmured. “Kind of like the juice boxes and trophies they give to every kid after they lose a soccer game.” Later, as Anderson and his colleagues pitched to him on why they should be hired to work on his next campaign, Jindal quipped, “I’d like to congratulate you guys. You had the cojones to come in here and tell me how good you are right after we just lost.” Another time, after his staff insisted that he sit for a briefing from his pollsters, he impatiently announced, “My calendar says that the next fifteen minutes are devoted to y’all presenting some junk science that is as useful to me as voodoo.”
Jindal’s aides mostly enjoyed his swaggering sarcasm, but they also recognized that it might not be received well outside the quarters of the foulmouthed, overcaffeinated political class. Anderson, in particular, worried that Jindal would come off as a condescending smart-ass if he revealed that side of himself to the public, and whenever it flared up during debate prep sessions or mock press interviews, the operative actively worked to tamp it down. “I always thought it was a little bit dangerous,” Anderson said.
But Jindal was no longer merely contending for votes in the Bayou State. He was vying for attention from a national conservative media complex that often appeared as though it valued political trolling above all other forms of persuasion. Proving your argument right was nice, and defeating your ideological enemies was great. But successfully whipping up the Left into an indignant, frothy-mouthed frenzy by saying something strategically provocative—that was the gold standard. And for a Republican who wanted to be a champion of the conservative movement, it was a craft that had to be mastered.
Over the next few months, Jindal punctuated his speeches with increasingly razor-edged partisan barbs. At the Saint Patrick’s Day Wild Irish Breakfast in Nashua, New Hampshire, he earned roaring applause and laughter with a line that would turn into a mainstay of his rhetoric. “Are we witnessing the most extremely liberal, ideological administration in our country’s modern history? Or are we witnessing the most incompetent administration in our country’s history? Well, to quote Secretary Clinton, what difference does it make?”
His writing became more fiery as well—not to mention more abundant. To overcome his distance from the DC press corps, Jindal began cranking out op-eds at a stunning pace, firing off more than twenty different articles in the first half of 2014, and sending his staff scrambling to find publications that would take them. No newspaper was too small, and no issue too obscure, to disqualify itself from Jindal weighing in: what mattered was that he was everywhere. There he was in the Ouachita Citizen, demanding to know what the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org had “against individuals with disabilities.” Here he was in the New York Post, comparing New York City’s mayor to a “petulant tyrant holding low-income students hostage.” There he was on some website called NetRightDaily, accusing the Obama administration of sending the IRS on a political witch hunt, or “jeopardizing the freedoms of billions of citizens the world over,” or any number of other transgressions. As with any weekly columnist—because that’s effectively what he had become—Jindal’s body of work varied in quality and tone. But the pieces often read as though they were written by the governor’s hyperaggressive alter ego, a right-wing Mr. Hyde.
He continued to roll out new policy proposals, but his efforts seemed pro forma, and his ideas were greeted unenthusiastically by the conservative wonk crowd. In the spring, Jindal’s policy group, America Next, introduced a proposed health-care plan that would repeal Obamacare, dramatically shrink costs, and reduce the number of Americans who were insured. The plan was missing many of the ideas he had written about at Oxford—it would eliminate the insurance mandate, provide no tax relief for catastrophic care, and lift regulations aimed at protecting people with preexisting conditions—and even many conservatives found it to be too austere. In April, when Jindal traveled to Washington and met with a small group of right-leaning policy writers and scholars to pitch the plan, he received strong pushback from conservatives who thought the kind of cuts he was calling for would be devastatingly unpopular in a post-Obamacare world. Writing about the plan after the meeting, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat summed up, in his perpetually polite manner, the real logic of Jindal’s plan: “Politically, I don’t think there’s any question that Jindal’s argument… would play well with at least part of the GOP electorate in a primary campaign.”
The overhaul to Jindal’s political persona was jarringly obvious to many in the press, but his team dutifully spun his new act as perfectly in sync with the old, wonky, thoughtful, “stupid party”–bashing governor. “He’s not a dog who’ll take a kicking,” an adviser told U.S. News when a reporter asked about the change in tone. “We are not hiding it anymore.”
In late April 2014, Jindal published an op-ed on CNN’s website titled “The ‘Stupid Party,’ Revisited” in which he sought to dispense with any lingering perception of himself as a smarty-pants scold trying to make his party more thoughtful and intelligent. “While it is true that we as Republicans need to do a better job articulating our principles and being the party of bold new ideas, the Democrats have a far worse problem,” he wrote. “Democrats need to stop being the party that thinks Americans themselves are stupid.” Never mind that less than two years earlier, one of his central prescriptions for his own party was to “stop insulting the intelligence of voters.” The new Jindal was a happy partisan warrior, doling out affirmation for Republicans and withering criticism for Democrats every chance he got.
This pose wasn’t entirely new for Jindal. He was a politician, after all, and black-and-white partisanship was always part of the gig. But for years, Jindal had been speaking to conservatives in two different languages, simulcasting brains and policy sophistication to the GOP elites, and a brash, rowdy zest for culture war to the right-wing base. The result was that his message had always been muddled—a sort of Spanglish that both groups could make out, but neither found particularly inspiring.
Now it was quite clear that Jindal had chosen the guttural growl of the conservative movement as his first language. His most ungenerous critics said he was a sellout, that he had dumbed himself down and become the embodiment of everything he once wanted to purge from his own party. But Jindal didn’t care. He had been blessed with the gift of tongues, and his fluency was winning converts—converts who might stick around for a presidential run. Who could possibly say that was dumb?
Four days after Jindal’s raucous performance in South Carolina, a small contingent of right-wing elites gathered for an intimate dinner party at the Great Falls, Virginia, home of conservative superactivist Brent Bozell.
The evening’s guest list comprised leaders of the country’s most influential Tea Party organizations and right-wing pressure groups—people whose shared mission was to burn down the Republican establishment and install a new regime of brash, populist hard-liners in its place. They included Heritage Action’s Mike Needham, who had masterminded the 2013 government shutdown; Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, who could sic a mob of culture warriors on any Republican who signaled disloyalty to the religious Right; Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin; Andy Roth of the Club for Growth; David Bossie of Citizens United; and prominent conservative fund-raiser Richard Norman. These were four-star generals in the conservative movement, and together they commanded millions of pavement-pounding activists and many tens of millions of dollars.
They were just starting in on the ceviche hors d’oeuvres when Martin glanced at her phone to check the early returns in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s primary race. Like her dinner companions, she viewed the Virginia congressman as emblematic of the Republicans’ corrupt, compromising congressional leadership—but she wasn’t holding out hope for him to lose tonight’s contest. Cantor was running against an obscure conservative economics professor named David Brat, who had little money and no discernible campaign structure. Last she had heard, his entire operation consisted of two part-time aides who shared a flip phone for campaign business. Just a few days earlier, the Washington Post had reported that the Cantor campaign’s internal polling showed him cruising to a thirty-four-point victory in the primary.
At the moment, Martin saw, Brat was slightly ahead in the vote totals—but only two precincts had reported so far. She shared the news with the dinner party.
“Cantor should give his concession speech now!” Bozell joked.
Everyone laughed, but it wasn’t long before their phones started buzzing with the startling news that Cantor, the second most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives, was actually about to go down to a grassroots insurgent.
The development upended the friendly dinner party, as attendees began hurriedly placing calls to activists and scanning their phones for updates. Somebody turned on CNN, and they watched, awestruck, as the race was officially called for Brat.
“Can you think of a greater political upset in your life?” Bozell marveled. “I can’t think of one. This is stunning. This is the conservative movement on fire.”
The mood at the party quickly evolved from shock, to ebullient celebration, and finally to defiance. All through the midterm primary season over the past few months, the people in this room had seen their efforts to engineer another 2010-style Tea Party insurrection fall flat. There was a reason for this: after watching Ted Cruz and his brigade of bomb throwers shut down the government a year earlier, the GOP’s establishment forces had redoubled their efforts to beat back right-wing challengers in primary races across the country and bolster electable, reasonable-sounding Republican candidates. With the help of groups from the chamber of commerce to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, they had largely succeeded—and lately the national political press had been permeated with obituaries marking the demise of the Tea Party.
Now Bozell and his comrades couldn’t help but indulge in a little gloating.
“Is the establishment going to get questions for the next week and a half asking whether they’re dead?” Martin joked sarcastically.
“Damn right we won!” Bozell exclaimed. “Damn right the movement is still alive!”
The irony was that none of the groups represented at Bozell’s dinner table had actually supported Brat’s campaign, all having deemed it a lost cause. Cantor, determined not to get caught flat-footed by a primary challenger, had actually sunk himself by spending $2 million on a negative ad campaign that inadvertently elevated his opponent and touched off a last-minute conservative backlash.
But even if it was a fluke, no one in Great Falls that night seemed to care. They had Cantor’s head on a pike, and they planned to hoist it in the air as they paraded through the streets reenergizing the right wing and reclaiming the momentum in the Republican civil war.
Over wine and vegetable lasagna, the group looked past the midterms and began plotting for the next presidential race. The question at hand was how they could use tonight’s coup to embolden the Tea Party, and make sure a true conservative triumphed in the 2016 primaries. Ted Cruz’s name came up. Rand Paul’s did, too. Somebody mentioned that Jindal was showing promise. They weren’t ready to coalesce around a single populist contender—at least not yet—but they all fervently agreed that they could not let the party nominate another milquetoast moderate like Mitt Romney.
As the room buzzed, Bozell briefly retreated from the dinner with his public relations consultant to craft a press release that ominously warned of the war on the horizon.
“Eric Cantor’s loss tonight is an apocalyptic moment for the GOP establishment,” the statement read. “The grass roots is in revolt and marching.”