Word: jindal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...widely expected victory Saturday night, Bobby Jindal, a 36-year-old Republican Congressman, won the Louisiana gubernatorial election, becoming the nation's first governor of Indian-American descent and the youngest chief executive of any state. Jindal took 54% of the vote in the state's off-year open primary, the first since Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and became the first non-white politician to hold the state's highest office since Reconstruction. Jindal, one of the few young rising stars in the G.O.P. ran on a strong reform platform. "Don't let anyone talk badly about Louisana...
...while on election night, it wasn't particularly clear which was the more exciting match-up: At the front of the ballroom, a crowd watched Jindal's results flashing on giant screens as they continued to rise, while in the back, pockets of people stood cheering at the LSU-Auburn game. In a region where college football is a religion, there was concern in the Jindal campaign about low turnout at the polls due to the game. At the end of the night, however, Jindal took almost 700,000 votes, the highest ballot numbers for a for a non-incumbent...
...Jindal, the son of Indian immigrants, is generally acknowledged to be an ambitious policy whiz kid. An Ivy League-educated Rhodes Scholar, he was appointed head of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, the state's largest agency, at the tender age of 24. At 28, he was tapped to head one of Louisiana's university systems. Two years later, he served in the Bush Administration as an assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services. He first ran for governor in 2003 at the age of 32, losing by a mere four percentage points to current...
...Following his defeat in 2003, Jindal ran for and won the congressional seat in Louisiana's first district. Since then, the staunch conservative - who converted from Hinduism to Catholicism as a teenager - has traveled often to northern Louisiana, hitting up churches and pressing the flesh. The strategy appears to have worked, as Jindal handily won the areas he lost to Blanco four years ago and that heavily supported white supremacist David Duke's bid for the governorship in 1991. Perhaps realizing the difficulties of running to lead a state that has by and large elected white males to higher office...
...turnout could help Jindal by giving his social conservative base a bigger share of the vote. But anti-incumbent sentiment could cost him: He began the race with a lead that made him seem like the incumbent right out of the gate. There's still time for one of the candidates to land a deadly blow or a bombshell to land; more likely, in a race that seems cautious by Louisiana standards, any surprises will come from the voters themselves...