By Arun Kumar,
Washington : Louisiana’s Indian-American governor Bobby Jindal says he is still “thinking and praying” about a 2016 presidential run, and his decison would come after the Nov 4 Congressional election and “sometime after the holiday.”
But with some potential competitors deferring until spring 2015, Jindal could be one of the first Republicans out of the gate, influential Politico news site said after his appearance Monday at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
Jindal, according to Politico, spent a good deal of his energy Monday chastising President Barack Obama over his foreign policy decisions, but he also appeared frustrated with the Republican Party’s reputation as an opposition party.
“The people in this country are hungry for a big change. There’s a lot of frustration,” he said. “They’re frustrated with the president, but they’ve yet to hear a comprehensive alternative from the Republicans.
“All they heard so far is that we’re opposed to many of his policies. What they are hungry for is a positive agenda from the Republican side,” Jindal said.
Noting that Jindal has also travelled to Iowa and New Hampshire, early presidential primary states, recently as well as Washington, Politico said these “seem to only add to the evidence that he is doing plenty to prepare for 2016 besides just ‘thinking and praying’.”
The news site cited a survey released last week by the left-leaning Public Policy Polling, suggesting a majority of Louisianans don’t want Jindal to run for president.
“But judging by the big crowd dotted with lobbyists and national media on Monday, there’s plenty of interest in Washington,” it said.
Jindal, according to CBS became the latest Republican to offer up a sweeping policy plan that could help anchor a 2016 presidential campaign.
Advocating more defence spending to “save the American military from damage done by Obama,” he said, “[Obama] leaves for the next president tools of hard power that have fallen into disrepair.”
Jindal also sought to divide the blame between Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is mulling her own run for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, CBS said.
“If only [Obama] had the help of a wise steady hand, a policy expert in dealing with foreign affairs, he’d have come up with better answers,” Jindal said ”
But instead he just had Hillary Clinton,” he was quoted as saying “Today, we are living with the consequences of the Obama-Clinton ideas when it comes to foreign, domestic, and defence policy.”
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])