Bobby Jindal and the political limits of anti-Muslim xenophobia

This should be Bobby Jindal's moment in the sun. The Louisiana governor launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination with a high-profile attack on Muslim immigrants. The son of immigrants himself, he railed against any people or group (well, Muslims) that would come to the United States and refuse to embrace its dominant culture and values. He was banging the gong about immigration before Donald Trump made it cool, and singling out Muslims for verbal abuse before Dr. Ben Carson said he wouldn't support a Muslim for president.

After the horrible terrorist attack in Paris, the Republican field shifted its foreign policy sights from defeating Russia's Vladimir Putin to slamming the door on Muslim refugees from Syria. Jindal should have been in his element: He had staked out his territory on the issue, and he was pretty quick to join his fellow Republican governors in trying to keep Syrians out, issuing a (largely symbolic) executive order to that effect on Monday morning. Instead, he dropped out of the presidential race, telling Fox News on Tuesday, "this is not my time."

If not now, when? Jindal was, as Shikha Dalmia said, "supposed to be the conservative answer to President Barack Obama: a first-generation Indian-American who rejected offers from Harvard med and Yale law to study political science on a Rhodes scholarship," and "the whiz-bang wonk who would use his policy smarts to lift the Republican Party from its doldrums with innovative solutions and vision." Instead, he decided to run for president as a vaguely shrill hardliner with a briefcase full of unread policy papers. (Voters, by and large, don't read policy papers.)

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It's hard to blame Jindal and his campaign for not reading the tea leaves right: This has been a confounding primary season for Republicans. "If anybody on this call or if any of you know anyone who sort of predicted the way this campaign has gone with the two gentlemen who'd be in first place, you're smarter than anyone else in the world," Curt Anderson, Jindal's chief strategist, told reporters on Tuesday. "It's been a bizarre race. I don't know that any of us can explain it."

But Jindal's early nativist pitch — his super PAC's first ad featured Jindal saying all immigrants should "adopt our values" and learn to speak English — should have been a winner with Republican primary voters. According to a new survey by the Public Religion Research Institute — conducted before the Paris attacks — about half of Republican primary voters (and 69 percent of Trump supporters) call immigration a critical issue for them personally. Some 73 percent of white evangelical Christians — a powerful group in the Iowa caucuses that Jindal was pouring his energies into — and 56 percent of all Americans agreed that "the values of Islam are at odds with American values and way of life." Combine the sentiments against immigration and Islam, and it's a good bet both those numbers went up after Paris.

So, if beating up on Muslims immigrants is supposedly good politics, why wasn't it good enough for Bobby Jindal?

If it wasn't the message, the problem was likely the messenger. There was always "concern that he wasn't charismatic enough to succeed in the Age of Obama," says W. James Antle III at The Washington Examiner, citing his unfortunate first impression as an example. "Most voters aren't wonks. The GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump, isn't a wonk." Republican voters also weren't apparently willing to cast their lots with a wonk serving red meat.

So, what about Trump? Did the unflagging GOP frontrunner steal Jindal's xenophobic platform, and thus his thunder? Is Trump primarily responsible for the demise of Jindal's presidential ambitions? Probably not.

I've always thought Trump's appeal wasn't the immigrant-baiting so much as the fact that he was willing to say outrageous things loudly and proudly, and get away with it because he's Donald Trump, Brash Billionaire. He's the Gossip Girl candidate: dark, entitled, rich, untouchable. We've been trained to root for Donald Trump for decades now, the wealthy maverick who doesn't play by the rules. There's a reason that kid in Iowa asked if Trump was Batman.

The Republican base — and much else of the country — is disgusted with politicians and bankers and other "elites." Donald Trump escapes that trap by insisting he isn't one of them, but he knows them and their games and can beat them, pull their strings. His early, unlikely jab about forcing Hillary and Bill Clinton to come to his third wedding didn't really hurt Clinton but it probably helped Trump.

Bobby Jindal is the unpopular governor of a state that — unlike John Kasich's Ohio or Chris Christie's New Jersey — is almost definitely going to vote Republican in the next election. That he outlasted Wisconsin's Scott Walker is a testament to his determination, or perhaps just his frugal campaigning.

Jindal is likely a very nice person, but he wasn't a very friendly candidate, whether out of conviction or cold political calculation. And as the Republican Party deliberately turns its backs on a population of desperate foreign families begging for a safe haven in the Land of the Free — like Jindal's parents, and Marco Rubio's, and Ted Cruz's — Jindal's early exit from the Republican race is a good reminder that xenophobic, anti-Muslim red meat isn't enough to buy yourself a seat at the Republican grown-up table, even when the people you're feeding have a decided taste for steak.