Watching Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal rebut President Obama’s speech the other night, I finally understood what Marcel Proust was getting at in his brick-sized Remembrance of Things Past.
From the moment Jindal glided up to the podium and began delivering an oversimplified history lesson on the “redemptive journey” that the President’s speech represented, I had a flashback to 1977. I was no longer a 37-year old man watching the Republican rebuttal, but a five year old boy watching an episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Jindal’s lethargic delivery and the patronizing substance of his remarks evoked my favorite children’s television star. After the first minute, I was wondering whether Jindal was going to put on a pair of slippers and zip up a sweater.
Howdy neighbor!
No disrespect to the late Fred Rogers, but the man’s job was to instruct children on adult concepts in a way they could easily understand. Perhaps Jindal thinks immigration policy, health care and personal finance are beyond the grasp of ordinary Americans.
How else do you explain something like this:
“[A]ll Americans are moved by the president’s personal story — the son of an American mother and a Kenyan father, who grew up to become leader of the free world. Like the president’s father, my parents came to this country from a distant land. When they arrived in Baton Rouge, my mother was already 4½ months pregnant. I was what folks in the insurance industry now call a ‘preexisting condition.’… Even after landing a job, [my dad] could still not afford to pay for my delivery — so he worked out an installment plan with the doctor. Fortunately for me, he never missed a payment. … [H]e would tell me, ‘Bobby, Americans can do anything.’”
I wondered whether Jindal would tell us a story next.
And then he did.
Leaving the Neighborhood-of-Make-Believe, he set out for greener pastures, regaling his listeners in a folksy voice with the tale of a rural sheriff with a compassionate heart.
Another Proustian episode. Only now, I was twelve years old and watching re-runs of The Andy Griffith Show.
The lawman he described yelling at someone on the telephone to come and arrest him could have been Barney Fife. Jindal himself was starting to sound an awful lot like Gomer Pyle.
The rest of the speech was a meandering riff on the “Americans can do anything” nugget his father imparted on him. Jindal talked about achieving energy independence, greater transparency in government, fiscal responsibility and military strength, but it was meaningless.
How can you take a politician seriously when he talks to the voters as if he were addressing pre-schoolers at recess?
The Republicans should stop trying to prove the GOP is not a party of old, wealthy white men. Sarah Palin only succeeded in swelling their rolls with lecherous “dudes” who had a Calamity Jane fetish. In Bobby Jindal, the Republican Party must have been hoping it would find its own Obama.
They came up short. Instead of trying to find an Obama antidote, they should focus on reconstituting their core values with ones that speak to the needs of average, middle-class Americans. For that, they need look no further than America’s suddenly all-time favorite president, Abraham Lincoln.
Perhaps the Republicans should start reading Proust-they may realize that the key to their future lies in their past.
