Bobby Jindal, How Did You End Up Here?

Bobby Jindal was never supposed to wind up here. In 2008, some people called him the GOP Obama. His minority status as an Indian American, his wonkiness — he graduated Brown at age 20, then became a Rhodes Scholar — evoked the kind of technocratic wunderkind bridge-building that Obama had sought to accomplish from the left.

And then it all went to hell.

So there he was, on Wednesday, semi-officially announcing his candidacy via creepy hidden camera footage of him telling his kids that he was running for president. Far from being folksy, it looked like the sort of footage the Tooth Fairy from Red Dragon uses to select his next victim. The Jindal family is witness to a great becoming. Unfortunately, that becoming is Bobby Jindal: Failed Presidential Candidate.

The knock on Jindal — the fact that you will see repeated until he slinks back to Baton Rouge and starts cold-calling conservative think tanks for the best seven-figure sinecure — is that he famously declared after Romney’s 2012 loss that the GOP needed to stop being “the stupid party,” and has been going balls-to-the-wall stupid ever since. And while that’s true, it overshadows the fact that Jindal’s always veered between weird and wrong, when he isn’t both.

There’s his conversion story. Raised a Hindu, Jindal initially explored Catholicism to get closer to a girl. Unlike the rest of us, who took up smoking or going to bad all-ages shows to have something in common with a crush, Jindal reordered his entire cosmology. Which, like, come on, man. Further, he famously participated in an exorcism in college, which puts him in good company with about .0001 percent of practicing Catholics in developed nations and definitely seems like the normal thing a smart person conversant in modern Catholicism would do.

One respect in which his faith has never wavered is the virtues of both the market and cutting government services. At age 24, Jindal inherited a huge debt as Louisiana’s Secretary of Health and Hospitals, restoring a surplus after closing clinics, reducing compensation to nurses and attempting to gut the Medically Needy Program and restrict Medicaid recipients to five prescriptions per month. Despite the rate of uninsured Louisianans (one of the nation’s highest) and despite his stints at Brown and Oxford, Jindal managed to walk away with the conclusion that it wasn’t a problem that America spends more as a percentage of GDP on health care than any other OECD nation and that we get 50 million uninsured for our troubles. Just a few more cuts, and a competitive marketplace no longer preying on mortally captive buyers would flower via the invisible thumbs-up of Jesus saying, “Let that happen.” Unsurprisingly, Jindal has declared his fierce opposition to Obamacare since day one, refusing to take the Medicaid expansion for his state. But at least those dead Louisianans never had to live in chains, man, and when they die they get to meet Ronald Reagan.