Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has a message for his party:We must compete for every single vote. The 47 percent and the 53 percent. And any other combination of numbers that adds up to 100 percent.This was part of a speech Jindal billed as something of a tough-love sermon aimed at getting Republicans to pull their collective heads out of their you-know-whats. The idea was that Jindal's speech would show conservatives how to make the case for their ideology without insulting voters like Republicans did in 2012, in the process setting himself up for 2016.
Maybe Jindal succeeded in convincing his fellow party members that he knows the path forward, but that one paragraph above he helped illustrate why he actually does not.
In Jindal's view, the main problem with Mitt Romney's 47 percent comment was the part where Romney said he could never win votes from people in the 47 percent. "My job is not to worry about those people," Romney said, speaking of his role as the GOP's standard bearer.
Obviously, you'd have to be an idiot to only compete for votes from 53 percent of the electorate, but the thing that was so wrong about what Mitt Romney said wasn't his idiotic electoral strategy'it's that he believed in the 47 percent nonsense in the first place.
The thing that was offensive is that Mitt Romney said 47 percent of the country are worthless moochers. The idea that he couldn't win their votes was ridiculous because the 47 percent actually do not exist. The thing that was offensive is the whole idea that there are makers and there are takers, not that Romney didn't think he could win votes from the 47 percent who were allegedly takers.
So while Bobby Jindal pats himself on the back for not being as dumb as Mitt Romney in writing off what he believes to be 47 percent of the country, he missed the larger point: There is no 47 percent. And that's why so many people were turned off by what Mitt Romney said.
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