Good to see an Indian American win something - regardless of his hate crime
laws opposition -ofcourse noone iin his family will need to worry about it --
only the New Orleans' black natives need worry. Right?
Umesh
Chan Mahanta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: From NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/us/19louisiana.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Highlighting mine.
cm
An Improbable Favorite Emerges in Cajun Country
Lee Celano for The New York Times
Bobby Jindal, left, an Indian-American, is favored to win the primary election
for Louisiana governor by enough to avoid a runoff.
Article Tools Sponsored By
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: October 19, 2007
FRANKLINTON, La., Oct. 17 - An Oxford-educated son of immigrants from India is
virtually certain to become the leading candidate for Louisiana's next governor
in Saturday's primary election. It would be an unlikely choice for a state that
usually picks its leaders from deep in the rural hinterlands and has not had a
nonwhite chief executive since Reconstruction.
But peculiar circumstances have combined to make Representative Bobby Jindal,
a conservative two-term Republican, the overwhelming favorite. Analysts predict
Mr. Jindal, 36, could get more than 50 percent of the vote in the open primary,
thus avoiding a November runoff and becoming the nation's first Indian-American
governor. If he fails to win a majority, he would face the next-highest vote
getter in the runoff.
Louisiana Democrats are demoralized, caught between the perception of
post-hurricane incompetence surrounding their standard bearer, Gov. Kathleen
Babineaux Blanco, who is not running for re-election, and corruption
allegations against senior elected officials like William J. Jefferson, the
congressman from New Orleans.
Leading Democrats begged off the governor's race, and Mr. Jindal's opponents
are from the second tier, trailing so badly in polls that Mr. Jindal has
ignored most of the scheduled debates among candidates, leaving the challengers
to take grumbling verbal shots at his empty chair.
The prize is not necessarily an enviable one: Louisiana is the nation's
poorest state, measured by per capita income; one of its unhealthiest; the
worst in infant mortality; and the least educated. It is last in attracting new
college-educated workers. Tens of thousands of people remain displaced by
Hurricane Katrina, the police department in New Orleans still operates largely
out of trailers, and neighborhoods are still trying to rebuild.
"The storms didn't cause all of our problems - they revealed a lot of our
problems," Mr. Jindal said in a brief interview this week. "It's an incredible
opportunity to change the state."
But he is not a natural fit for Louisiana. The state likes its governors to
know the fundamentals of the Cajun two-step, speak some derivation of French
patois, and at least get to a duck blind, regularly and publicly. But Mr.
Jindal has labored assiduously to overcome the disadvantage of being a
non-Cajun, Rhodes Scholar policy wonk whose given name was Piyush, and who has
a penchant for 31-point plans.
He is a born-again Roman Catholic who has suggested that teaching intelligent
design as an alternative to evolution may not be out of place in public
schools, favors a ban on abortion and opposes hate-crimes laws. Conservative
views aside, the slightly built congressman is anything but a backslapping good
ol' boy.
He lost to Ms. Blanco in 2003 largely in places like this, Washington Parish,
a hardscrabble rural area 70 miles north of New Orleans, where voters openly
expressed unease four years ago about opting for someone of Mr. Jindal's race.
In areas where the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke won in the 1991 governor's
race - here and in the deeply conservative parishes of north Louisiana - Mr.
Jindal lost.
But by Wednesday, three days before Mr. Jindal's second attempt at the
governor's mansion, he was greeted here, if not with great warmth, at least
without alarm. The congressman, tossing souvenir cups from a fire truck in a
town parade, was met with shouts of "Hey Bobby!" from the rural whites lining
the route.
Mr. Jindal picked out familiar faces in the crowd, greeted the sheriff like an
old friend and posed for a picture with man sporting a Confederate flag tattoo.
For months, the congressman has cultivated the rural areas where he lost in
2003, "witnessing" in remote Pentecostal churches, neutralizing his image of
being hyperqualified - head of the state health department at 24, head of the
university system at 28 and under secretary for the Department of Health and
Human Services at 30 under President Bush - that did not help him the last
time. In one recent debate, Mr. Jindal boasted that he had made 77 trips to
north Louisiana since announcing his candidacy.
Insinuations about his excessive intellectual capacity are still being made.
"It's not going to be about the smartest person in this race," Walter Boasso, a
Democratic state senator and one of Mr. Jindal's opponents, said recently. But
such remarks do not seem to be catching on with voters apparently weary of
bumbling at the Capitol in Baton Rouge and at City Hall in New Orleans.
This time, Mr. Jindal is aiming his multipoint plans at ethical reform in
state government, schools and economic development, and attacks on his
wonkishness have fallen flat. Mr. Jindal kept a low profile after Hurricane
Katrina, but opponents are not attacking him for that either, perhaps because
few others in Louisiana's political class have stepped up.
Mr. Jindal told a group in Jefferson Parish this week that he had "150
specific proposals," after rattling unflinchingly through a good many in a
12-minute speech.
He makes a particular case for a "war on corruption," as he puts it, in Baton
Rouge, proposing to tighten financial disclosures on lobbyists and legislators
and to prohibit business relationships between legislators and the state. He
promises to build up infrastructure like ports, to devote attention to research
universities and promote technical training. He hardly mentions Mr. Bush, a
sharp contrast to four years ago when he often boasted of his connections to
the president.
Past governors have charged into Baton Rouge promising reform only to founder
in the change-resistant Legislature. Mr. Jindal will most likely face long odds
too, if he fulfills the near-universal prediction that he will come out on top.
_______________________________________________
assam mailing list
assam@assamnet.org
http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
---------------------------------
Yahoo! Answers - Get better answers from someone who knows. Tryit now._______________________________________________
assam mailing list
assam@assamnet.org
http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
