Bobby Jindal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bobby Jindal
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Louisiana's 1st district
Incumbent
Assumed office
January 3, 2005
Preceded by David Vitter
Succeeded by Incumbent
Governor-elect of Louisiana
Taking office
January 14, 2008
Lieutenant(s) Mitch Landrieu
Succeeding Kathleen Blanco
Born June 10, 1971 (1971-06-10) (age 36)
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Nationality American Flag of the United States
Political party Republican
Spouse Supriya Jolly Jindal
Religion Roman Catholic
Piyush "Bobby" Jindal (born June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge) is the Republican Governor-elect of the U.S. state of Louisiana. He is currently a member of the United States House of Representatives, representing Louisiana's 1st congressional district, where he was elected in 2004 to succeed current U.S. Senator David Vitter. Jindal was re-elected to Congress in the 2006 election with 88 percent of the vote. On October 20, 2007 he was elected the first non-white governor of Louisiana since Reconstruction and the first elected Indian American governor in U.S. history. He will take his oath as governor on January 14, 2008. This will trigger a special election.
He is the only Indian-American currently serving in Congress, and the second in congressional history after Dalip Singh Saund, a Democrat who represented California's 29th District from 1957 to 1963.
He was chosen by Scholastic Update magazine as "one of America's top 10 extraordinary young people for the next millennium."[citation needed]
He was India Abroad Person of the Year in 2005.[1]
Personal life
Jindal (pronounced /ˈdʒɪndəl/) was born in Baton Rouge to recently arrived Punjabi Indian immigrants, Amar and Raj Jindal, who were attending graduate school. His family is of Punjabi ancestry, his father left India in the 1970s and his ancestral family village of Khanpura.[2] According to family lore, Jindal adopted the name Bobby after watching The Brady Bunch television program at age four. He has been known by that name ever since, as a civil servant, politician, student, and writer. Legally though his name remains Piyush Jindal.[3]
Jindal was a Hindu but converted to Catholicism. [4] He has also offered testimony before Baptist and Pentecostal congregations since the beginning of the 2007 campaign season.[5] He attended high school at Baton Rouge Magnet High School and graduated at 16. In 1991, he graduated from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with honors in biology and public policy. Afterwards, he received a master's degree in political science from New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. While at Oxford, he wrote an article for the New Oxford Review in which he claimed to have witnessed a friend being possessed by a demon.[6] After Oxford, he joined McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm. In this capacity, he advised Fortune 50 companies.
In 1997, Jindal married Supriya Jolly (born 1972). The couple has three children, Celia, Shaan, and Slade.
On August 15, 2006, he assisted in delivering his third child when his wife awoke, in labor. The child was born before ambulances had time to respond.[7]
Government service
In 1995, U.S. Congressman Jim McCrery (R-LA) introduced Jindal to Republican Governor Murphy J. Foster, Jr..[8] In 1996, Foster appointed Jindal to be Secretary of Louisiana's Department of Health and Hospitals, an agency then representing about 40 percent of the state's budget. During his tenure as Secretary, Louisiana's Medicaid program went from bankruptcy with a $400 million deficit into three years of surpluses totaling $220 million. In 1998, Jindal was appointed Executive Director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, a 17-member panel charged with devising plan to reform Medicare.
In 1999, at the request of the Louisiana Governor's Office and the Louisiana State Legislature, Jindal volunteered his time to study how Louisiana might use its $4.4 billion tobacco settlement. That same year, Jindal was appointed to become the youngest-ever president of the University of Louisiana System. In March 2001, he was nominated by President George W. Bush to be Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of Health and Human Services. [9] He was later unanimously confirmed by a bipartisan vote of the United States Senate and began serving on July 9, 2001. In that position, he served as the principal policy advisor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services.[10] He resigned from that post on February 21, 2003 to return to Louisiana and run for Governor.[11]
2003 campaign for Governor
Jindal came to national prominence during the 2003 election for Governor of Louisiana.
In the jungle primary, Jindal came in first place with 33 percent of the vote. He received endorsements from the largest paper in Louisiana, the New Orleans Times-Picayune; the newly-elected Democratic mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin; and the outgoing Republican governor, Mike Foster. In the second balloting, Jindal faced the outgoing Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Lafayette, a Democrat. Despite winning in Blanco's hometown, he lost many normally conservative parishes in north Louisiana, and Blanco prevailed with 52 percent of the popular vote.
Political analysts have speculated on myriad explanations for his loss. Some have blamed Jindal for his refusal to answer questions about his record brought up in several advertisements,[12] which the Jindal Campaign called "negative attack ads". Others note that a significant number of conservative Louisianans remain more comfortable voting for a Democrat, especially a conservative one, than for a Republican. Still others have mentioned the race factor, arguing that many voters are uncomfortable voting for a non-white person; this theory has lost some support in light of the 2007 election results. Finally, favorite-daughter voting for Blanco in southwestern Louisiana, a swing region of the state, may have contributed to the outcome in 2003.
Despite losing the election, the run for governor made Jindal a well known figure on the state's political scene. He formally declared his intention to run again on January 22, 2007 and eventually won the race for governor.
