Can Bobby Jindal rescue the GOP?

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is pulling no punches in offering fellow Republicans his prescription for patching up the party after a rough November election. "We must stop being the stupid party," the rising GOP star said in a keynote speech to the Republican National Committee's Winter Meeting on Thursday night. "We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters." That, he said, means the GOP has to quit obsessing about crunching budget numbers and pushing for austerity, and focus instead on policies that promote growth and free markets. It means Republicans have to stop making "stupid and bizarre" comments — a reference to Senate candidate Todd Akin's statement about "legitimate rape" — and "compete for every single vote: the 47 percent and the 53 percent," a thinly veiled swipe at Mitt Romney's caught-on-camera dissing of Americans who pay no income taxes.

At Hot Air, Allahpundit says Jindal might be onto something. Mandatory spending, especially on health care, is running out of control. We'll never fix the problem without drumming it into people's "skulls, often and in grotesque detail, just what sort of Thunderdome clusterfark we’re facing" if we don't get our finances in order. Still, that doesn't mean it's smart to go into elections waving Rep. Paul Ryan's budget powerpoints as if Ryanism is "the party's national brand."

At the very least, Jindal is claiming a role in the debate over how to broaden the GOP's appeal, says to Mark Preston at CNN. "If you just arrived from the planet Neptune, you should know that Jindal is not your stereotypical Republican," Preston says. "He is the son of immigrants from India." And like another emerging GOP leader — Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American from Florida — Jindal has a particular interest in helping the party get it right, as he, like Rubio, is pretty clearly eyeing a White House run in 2016.

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The question is, how will Jindal move beyond a headline-grabbing speech and actually change the policies championed by the GOP? Jamelle Bouie argues at The Washington Post that despite his tough talk, Jindal is just more of the same, as he "embodies the same right-wing policies that sank Mitt Romney and damaged the GOP’s appeal to middle and working-class Americans." In Louisiana, he has been Mr. Austerity, slashing spending on education and health care, Bouie says, while proposing a tax plan that's more regressive than Ryan's.