Jindal cuts La. budget 25% and sky doesn't fall

Jim Geraghty

is a contributing editor at National Review, who frequently appears on CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC

One gubernatorial election ended early this fall, when Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal won the state's blanket primary Oct. 22. Under Louisiana's system, all candidates of all parties are listed on the ballot, and if no one gets 50 percent, the top two finishers go to a runoff. Jindal blew past the threshold with 66 percent.

Jindal's reelection was unusual in several respects. The only previous time the state has not had a runoff was his election in 2007. He is only the fourth Republican governor in the last 125 years in Louisiana, and one of those four switched over from the Democrats in office. Jindal's best-known challenger this year was a schoolteacher, who raised less than 1 percent of the incumbent's campaign treasury. The Democratic State Central Committee declined to endorse any candidate running on its party label.

But perhaps most unbelievable is that Jindal faced no serious competition after cutting state spending more than 25 percent. In January 2008, the state had a budget of $34.3 billion. This summer, Jindal signed into law a budget spending $25 billion. As governors from Harrisburg to Trenton to Columbus to Madison have learned, cutting a state's budget is difficult enough; doing so without a significant backlash seems a politically impossible task.

A key part of Jindal's story is recognizing that he took the helm of a state that had hit bottom: Decades of mismanagement and corruption had taken their toll even before Hurricane Katrina wreaked such devastation and exposed such colossal unresponsiveness in state government. The state, recognizing the bitter fruit of its traditions of colorful corruption, was ready to take a chance on a then-37-year-old Indian American congressman who speaks roughly 100 words per minute. The state was willing to try a new approach to governing; how much worse could it be?

Privatization played a big role in Jindal's reinvention of state government, with private contractors taking over state-run operations for a lesser cost. The companies often hired the state workers who would often be the centerpiece of opponents' criticism.