John Heilemann, New York Magazine
- Not long after Barack Obama delivers his pseudo–State of the Union on February 24, the official televised Republican riposte will be uncorked by a guy who violates almost every prevailing liberal stereotype of the contemporary GOP: the governor of Louisiana, Piyush “Bobby” Jindal. At 37, Jindal is the nation’s youngest governor and the first Indian-American to win statewide office in U.S. history. The son of Punjabi immigrants, he’s an Ivy League–educated Rhodes scholar and an unrepentant policy wonk, with heterodox views on his specialty, which is health care, and a reputation for competence as much as ideology. For all these reasons and others, Jindal strikes many savvy conservatives as the answer to their party’s prayers: a brainy, precocious, multiculti change agent—a Republican Obama.
Precious few have ever described Michael Steele quite that way, though his recent rise to national prominence is hard to imagine outside the context of our new president. The victory of Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor and failed Senate candidate, in the contest to become chairman of the Republican National Committee came as a surprise; he’d often been criticized as insufficiently far right to win.
