Bob Cesca
Posted December 3, 2008 | 07:21 PM (EST)
... I really can't think of a Republican answer to Barack Obama. Once again, however, the Republicans are betting on either Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal to be the knock-off Bizarro Obama. Palin aside, the notion that Jindal is the "Republican Obama" amplifies how truly ridiculous and desperate the Republicans are.
They're making a huge mistake in assuming that just because Jindal is young and of unusual ethnic origins that he's the equivalent of Barack Obama -- in the same way they mistakenly calculated that Sarah Palin would attract female voters just because she's a woman, even though she possessed none of the positive qualities of Senator Clinton. It's totally shallow and vaguely racist. A party which has so often dealt in identity politics and racial divisiveness to suddenly go, "Hey, look over here! We have an ethnic, too!" seems weird and awful to me.
Additionally, Jindal's religious extremism won't manufacture any new Republican voters from the middle -- he's anti-choice without exceptions, he supports teaching creationism as a science in public schools and, yes, he once performed an exorcism on a friend who he believed was possessed by a demon. Yeah, if there's one thing the Republican Party needs more of, it's religious zealotry.
So we have an exorcist, a Bush, a turkey geeker who makes people explode, and Newt, who, by the way, wrote a book imagining if the South had won the Civil War. If these cable reality show misfits represent the future of the Republican Party, it's going to be a seriously entertaining four years.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/sarah-palin-the-new-and-e_b_148236.html