NEW ORLEANS — Under the direction of Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, Louisiana has enacted reforms to education, ethics, health care and taxes, generating buzz about Jindal’s future and making Louisiana a case study in policy solutions.
Tonight, Jindal will deliver the keynote address at The Heritage Foundation’s 37th annual Resource Bank, taking place in the Crescent City through Friday. The Foundry will carry the remarks live beginning around 9:30 p.m. ET.
Jindal, 42, was sworn in as Louisiana’s governor in 2008 and made comprehensive ethics reform a top priority. In the years that followed, Jindal focused on tax reform and improvements to the state’s health care, education, and transportation systems.
Recently, he’s turned his attention to national issues, quarreling with President Obama over the country’s lackluster economic growth. (Louisiana’s unemployment rate is 4.9 percent, compared to the country’s 6.7 percent.)
In an exclusive to The Foundry earlier this month, Jindal wrote:
I firmly believe that President Obama’s policies are failing our economy, and I won’t be afraid to say so. But I just as firmly believe that as conservatives, we have an obligation to put forward our own plans about how we can turn our country around.
Our country can do better—and under a conservative vision of reform, we will.
Writing in National Review this week, Quin Hillyer said Jindal has overcome stumbles in the past to position himself as part of the national conversation.
“Jindal now has a much more forceful mien, combined with the well-modulated passion of somebody who means business,” Hillyer wrote after attending a Jindal speech in Mobile, Ala.
Jindal was born and raised in Baton Rouge and has served as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, president of the University of Louisiana System, and assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He represented Louisiana’s 1st District in Congress from 2005 to 2008.
