Thank you for the clarification but not really important. Jindal is an American.

I thought the NYT story was interesting in how the reporter, and I would assume many Northern Democrats, saw the election and the associated WSJ commentary.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

You've confused me. If roughly 10% of the population are bigots, how do they almost elect Duke?







Out of Gurkha's info, if I were in LA it would concern me if he were ducking debates and other fora to inform the people of his positions and to defend them. The rest of the stuff is typical politics. It'll be interesting to see if he's a typical politician.

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1984 300TD

Yep, makes me wonder as well.

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2015 Gurkha with OM616 DI turbo

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EXACTLY the point.

Notice the conflicts in interpretation.

In the first instance it is assumed that everybody who voted for Duke must be a bigot.

In the second instance, Jindal lost because of the bigot vote.

In the 3rd instance, the honkey vote carried Jindal into office.

Huh?

What I get from that is that bigotry, if present, is secondary to other considerations. For example many people distrusted Edwards (D) MORE than they were repulsed by Duke (R). Thus, is a vote for Duke necessarily a bigoted vote?

In the second example Jindal (R) and Blanco (D) were in a statistical dead-heat yet Blanco won. Many people said it was because of racism against Jindal because the folks in N Louisiana did not vote for him in the projected numbers.

In the 3rd example Jindal (R) acquired 58% of the vote over 3 white guys, both Repo and Demo.

To me, that indicates a greater complexity to the vote than mere bigotry, which is the easy answer that most "pundits" and outsiders (non-southerners) immediately grab. In general, we prefer the conventional simple wisdom and familiarty over the complex and unfamiliar.

My FIL, a wealthy physician, lifelong liberal democrat and politician hired the first black deputy Coroner in the State of La. He was president of the state Coroner's association at the time and took a good bit of flack, down to having to fund the deputy's salary out of his own pocket--which he did for his next two terms. He also forced the integration of the State (I guess State) prison in his parish and made the same medical treatment available to whites in said facility available to blacks where as it was not before.

He also voted for Duke.

Now that's a complicated character.

B

LA is more civilized than most people think wait til the news breaks that they have 4 year colleges.

You also don't hear much about recounts and hanging chads.

An' we jus' love dem sojer-boys.

Bot

------------------------------------------------

Ethnicity is no bar to Jindal's dream

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 24, 2007

MONROE, LA. — When Bobby Jindal lost his first Louisiana governor's race four years ago, some experts told him that white people here were not ready to elect a dark-skinned son of Indian immigrants.

On Tuesday, as he dashed across the state in a victory caravan after his historic Saturday landslide win, Louisiana's Republican governor-elect had a message for his rural supporters: Thank you for proving the conventional political wisdom wrong.

Jindal, 36 -- who will become the first Indian American governor of any state, the youngest current governor in the country, and the first nonwhite to lead Louisiana since Reconstruction -- refused to believe that his ethnicity was an obstacle to his political dreams.

He essentially never stopped campaigning after his 2003 defeat to Democratic Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, an election in which he failed to win over many of the white rural voters who could have been expected to love his conservative positions.

Jindal was convinced that if voters got to know him, they would see him as a fellow native son from Baton Rouge, not an exotic foreigner with an Ivy League degree.

So he made more than 70 trips to northern Louisiana cities such as Shreveport, and the devout Catholic seemingly attended Sunday Mass at every small church in the state, even after he was elected to represent suburban New Orleans in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004.

"In these small Louisiana towns, retail politics is very important," Jindal said in an interview from his tour bus as he rode to the town of Natchitoches. He always believed Blanco beat him simply because she was better known. "I don't think there's any substitute for staring someone in the eye and listening," he said.

Jindal's tireless tours, especially in the conservative northern parishes considered key to his earlier defeat, impressed seasoned political observers, who said that by the time his rivals entered this year's race, Jindal's hard-earned backing in the rural strongholdwas insurmountable.

"I have never seen anyone work so hard," said Bernie Pinsonat, a Louisiana pollster and political consultant. "I had a local legislator tell me that he had to go to church more often, because Jindal had been to his church more times than he had."

Jindal wound up winning all but four of Louisiana's 64 parishes -- nearly the entire state except New Orleans. It was an embarrassing defeat for Democrats, who were unable even to force Jindal into a runoff.

Under Louisiana's open primary rules, a candidate who can secure more than half the total vote wins outright. Jindal got 54% despite competing against 11 other candidates.

Blanco opted not to seek reelection this year after her response to Hurricane Katrina drew widespread criticism, and no prominent Democrat stepped in to challenge Jindal. The Democrats' strongest candidate Saturday, State Sen. Walter J. Boasso, was a former Republican who switched parties just before the race.

Though Democrats hold a 2-1 edge in voter registration in Louisiana, recent statewide elections -- such as GOP Sen. David Vitter's commanding 2004 victory, also during an open primary -- have demonstrated a clear tilt to the right.

Piyush "Bobby" Jindal's meteoric rise through the Republican Party ranks is already legend in Louisiana, as is his personal version of the American dream.

His parents moved to Baton Rouge from India shortly before he was born so that his mother could study nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. His father is a civil engineer.

At age 4, Jindal asked his teacher to refer to him henceforth as Bobby, after a character from "The Brady Bunch." His parents worried that he was going through a phase. But they also obliged, and Jindal has been known as Bobby since. When he converted from Hinduism to Catholicism at age 18, he used Robert as his baptismal name.

At 24, the Brown University- and Oxford-educated wunderkind was named head of the Louisiana Department of Heath and Hospitals by then-Gov. Mike Foster, placing him in charge of a $4-billion budget and 13,000 employees -- and on the political fast track.

Yet he learned in 2003 that his sterling resume was not enough to get him elected governor in Louisiana -- and could even serve as a hindrance. Democrats ran ads criticizing the steep cuts Jindal had made as health chief, and questioning whether the Ivy Leaguer was in touch with common folk. The ads seemingly worked.

After that defeat, Jindal launched a statewide charm offensive. Richard Hartley, a former school superintendent from near Monroe who said he helped connect Jindal with local church groups, said he saw the difference Jindal made by repeatedly showing up.

"A lot of people didn't trust him" in 2003, said Hartley, 50. "I think it was a way for people to learn that, yes, he was an Indian American, but also as Louisianan as the day is long. It was never a question after that."

Jindal will never be mistaken for Huey Long on the stump. Nor did his wooden campaign speeches in Alexandria, Shreveport and Monroe on Tuesday bring to mind the oratory of such charismatic characters as former Gov. Edwin Edwards.

But when Jindal, wearing cowboy boots and a dark blazer, spoke about his desire to clean up Louisiana's corrupt image and bring competence to state government, the crowd cheered the policy wonk's every word.

"I think people have finally gotten past that," Jerry Roshto, a 43-year-old machinist, said of Jindal's ethnicity. "I'm not looking at the past, and I don't think he is either. He has a chance to do something special."

miguel.bustillo@latimes.com

I'm signing up fo the PHD program...

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"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL

In the parishes (counties) with a dominant African-American population, Jindal's margin of the black vote increased from 2003 to 2007 from 31% in 2003 to 38% in 2007. White vote increased from 43% to 50%.

In other words, both whites and blacks shifted their vote by the same amount in the black-dominated and white-dominated parishes. This does NOT look like a racial vote to me.

(sources were US Census Bureau for racial stats and State of LA for voter stats. I crunched the numbers).

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?_bm=n&_lang=en&mt_name=DEC_2000_PL_U_GCTPL_ST2&format=ST-2&_box_head_nbr=GCT-PL&ds_name=DEC_2000_PL_U&geo_id=04000US22
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pEB859VHC8MYemHTRdGFLBQ

B

I wanted some clarification so I would know what I was going to debate against you about, but I happen to agree with you. Voting or not voting for someone is not an indication of the bias of a whole state.

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1984 300TD

When all is said and done, Louisiana is not biased, there are probably more Yankee states up north that have more ethnic and racial bias than whats perceived as norm.

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2014 Rexton W with OM612 VGT

Don't leave out the West and Midwest.

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Quit lynching back in the '30's in my home town. And that last one was a white guy who stole and robbed (well, suspected of ...). LA is different from the American slave states.

Yes, there was definitely racial discrimination. I lived it and it was bad. But I also lived in Atlanta where it was much, much worse. That it was worse elsewhere does not excuse the abysmal treatment of non-whites, but I hope that it gives people the idea that "Jim Crow" was not monolithic across geography and through time.

I've been looking at tax records in a rural parish in NE Louisiana, not far from Jena. (project to explain the forest conditions and patterns from the public land survey in the early 1800's to 1941) and was surprised by how many taxpaying black farmers there were during the depths of Jim Crow. The records show taxes paid and describe the farmer by name then, "Negro". I wonder what happened to them? They just disappear from the records.