A candidate with a better story to tell
President Obama is headed for retirement in less than two years and his opponents control Congress. You would think this would be the moment for his most fervent detractors to start marking off the days on the calendar and contemplating what lies over the horizon.
Right?
Well, not quite.
After the State of the Union address Jan. 20, Sandy Rios of the American Family Association told a caller on her radio show that there were coded Muslim messages in the speech because Obama used the word “pillar.” Rios pointed out that “you know there are five pillars of Islam, and he used the term ‘pillars’ again in his speech last night.”
There’s been no word yet on what secret messages might be lurking if you play the State of the Union address backward, like sleuthing fans of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin did with their albums in hash-soaked, dorm-room reveries in the 1960s and 1970s.
Ever since he arrived on the national political stage a decade ago, Obama’s adversaries – in fairness, the most fevered ones – have attempted to use his exotic background against him. To them, the fact that his father hailed from Kenya, his mother was from Kansas, he grew up in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, is an indication that Obama is somehow “foreign” and not “one of us.” One of the conspiratorial claims they’ve peddled is that the president is a “secret Muslim” who wants to go easy on terrorists, even though there is 1) no evidence that Obama is Muslim, 2) it wouldn’t matter if he were, because, as per the Constitution, public officials are not required to adhere to a specific faith, or any faith, in order to serve, 3) Islam is a perfectly legitimate faith to belong to, and 4) the notion that he is going easy on terrorists would surely surprise Osama bin Laden and hundreds of people who have been killed in drone strikes authorized by Obama’s administration.
In theory, Bobby Jindal, the 43-year-old Republican governor of Louisiana with presidential aspirations, would be uniquely positioned to take up Obama’s mantle and demonstrate, as the president has, America’s multicultural promise and how the corridors of power are no longer the exclusive preserve of the white and Anglo-Saxon. Jindal’s parents came to the United States from India, and Jindal himself is a Rhodes scholar. The name he was given at birth was Piyush, he has a wife named Supriya and children named Selia, Shaan and Slade. Raised in the Hindu tradition, he is now a practicing Catholic.
But instead of emphasizing those parts of his impressive biography, Jindal seems intent on currying favor with voters who dwell in his party’s most intolerant fringe, who traffic in hatred and fear of Muslims. In a speech recently in London, he repeated the thoroughly debunked canard that there are “no-go zones” in some cities where Muslim immigrants practice Sharia law without regard to established secular laws. When asked later about the allegations by a reporter, Jindal couldn’t back them up. The same claim, made about Birmingham, England, by an alleged terrorism expert on the Fox News Channel, prompted British Prime Minister David Cameron to call the hapless commentator “a complete idiot.”
Perhaps even worse, Jindal has implied that, while he and his family have been models of American assimilation, many Muslims have not.
Jindal and his advisers must believe that, in order to win over those who might question his bona fides as an American, he has to bend over backward and pander to their worst instincts. It’s not an uplifting spectacle. He has a better story to tell.