This Bobby Jindal guy, if I were you I wouldn’t sell him short just because he totally bombed his first national address last week. The man has dogged perseverance down to a fine art. King Bruce’s spider probably takes lessons from him.
Take that story he told last Tuesday night in his response to Barack Obama‘s address to Congress. That lovely little story about how he rode to the rescue when Sheriff Henry Lee was having a spot of trouble with bureaucratic red tape “during Katrina”:
During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go – when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.
A wonderful story, wonderfully told.
Now, here’s the point. The story didn’t emerge from Bobby Jindal fully formed on the very first try. No, there were several different trial versions. That is to say, substantially different from the final published version. But Bobby Jindal, he just hung in there, and stuck to it, and eventually he got it right.
Here, from No More Mister Nice Blog, is the public record of his try-try-try-again.
Ouachita Citizen, August 29, 2007:
“A lot of foolish things happened following the storm,” Jindal said. “We all remember the horror stories.
“People were still in the water. Numerous heroes rushed down with boats to rescue them, but then the bureaucrats got involved. They said if you don’t have proof of registration and insurance, you’re not allowed to go into the water.
“People were drowning, and they were worried about paperwork. Look, if I’m drowning, I don’t care if you steal the boat, I hope you come and get me.”
Rush Limbaugh radio show, February 8, 2008:
I witnessed the frustration of the local law enforcement officials. At one point, volunteers were rushing in boats, to come and pick up people out of the water. Some bureaucrat decided that they couldn’t go in the water — turned away even sheriff’s deputies because he said they didn’t have the right paperwork. He said if you don’t bring proof of insurance and registration, you can’t go in the water to rescue. That is the kind of inane absurdity of the bureaucracy.
Jindal told me, “There are thousands of these stories. I talked to a sheriff in an area where they had people with boats that were ready to go in the water and rescue people and they were turned away because they didn’t have proof of registration and insurance, they didn’t bring the right paperwork. The bureaucracy was just awful.”
It is entirely possible that Jindal attended a fiction-writing workshop or two in the last six months. Certainly, the story improved substantially when he shifted from the third-person to a first-person narrative, added dialog, and turned the narrator into a central actor in the drama.
Too bad that political fiction doesn’t seem to have a very appreciative audience these days.