Desperately seeking messiahs

America, a nation that has forgotten both God and common sense, busies itself this electoral "silly season" looking for messiahs in all the wrong places.

ON THE LEFT, some of Sen. Barack Obama's sillier supporters seem to think he, if only we elect him president, might lead us to the Promised Land. After all, the man is black (and white!), he's cool under fire and he gives a hell of a speech.

Meanwhile, on the right, some of the sillier members of a stupid party are looking into the fever swamps of Louisiana for their messiah. After all, the state's new governor, Bobby Jindal, is brown, he's a scary-smart policy wonk and he's conservative, dammit . . . whatever "conservative" happens to mean this month.

Now, silly young people designing silly faux-religious icons with Obama's serene visage replacing that of Christ, the Virgin Mary or a saint are way up there on the silly-o-meter.

And sillier yet might be author Alice Walker writing columns in British newspapers with prose like "He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill."

BUT I AM NOT convinced that, for all its nuttery, the Obama worship is any crazier than that of Jindal by the GOP chattering classes. I mean, get a load of this by Mary Katharine Ham on Townhall.com:

There once was a man who campaigned on a message of hope and change. In his victory speech he promised never to succumb to a worldview in which “lobbyists begin to look larger and the people begin to look smaller.” In exchange, he asked voters to help him “defeat cynicism” by believing in him and themselves.

For schools, for government, for business, “change is not just on the way . . . Change begins tonight,” he proclaimed, his quick grin and young family breathing life back into a process gone sour, his unique life story bringing voters from unexpected backgrounds.

Sound familiar? It should. You’ve heard the media tell the story a thousand times a day. They’re just telling it about the wrong guy.

These days, Bobby Jindal is working for change in a city that could eat the ethical foibles of Obama’s Chicago for breakfast, like so many shrimp upon a bed of grits. Elected governor of Louisiana in 2007, he replaced the politically deflated Kathleen Blanco, who did not seek reelection.

Jindal is keenly aware of the problematic legacy he inherits. Inside Huey Long’s sky-scraping capital building, “I wonder what crimes were committed here?” is a not infrequent visitor question, posed not quite jokingly. The state’s political history is fraught with the kind of men Southerners often euphemistically call “colorful,” who given proper federal investigation, end up being very uneuphemistically corrupt.

READY TO PUKE? No? Well hang on, then. Read this and, soon enough, you'll be purging like a New York model after a cheesecake binge:

He’s also aware of the opportunity his state offers. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were talked about, on a national level, as revelations of persistent poverty in America. In Louisiana, they were a reminder, too, of the political perfidy that’s perpetuated it.

“Shame on us if all we build is what was here before,” Jindal told a small group of bloggers at the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge last week.

Unwilling to accept Louisiana as it was — one of the most uneducated, unethical, and unhealthy states in the union — Jindal made ethics reform his first priority, working on the theory that being a national punchline doesn’t draw business investment.

The 36-year-old governor slid into a January special legislative session on the strength of his political capital and came out with one of the strongest ethics reform packages in a nation awash with attempts at reform.

(snip)

To Jindal, the big-government response to Hurricane Katrina betrayed conservatives’ lack of confidence in their own ideas, and his first three months in office have gone a long way toward showing he has all the courage of conviction he needs.

The Republican Party remains the party of ideas in Louisiana, under Jindal’s leadership. And, as the unabashed policy wonk runs through four-point plan after four-point plan in his detailed recipe for Cajun-style reform, his 3-year-old son big-wheeling through the foyer of the governor’s mansion, one can’t help but think, “So this is what real change looks like.”

OH. PUH. LEEZE. Just because the Democrats of Louisiana are, indeed, sad specimens it does not therefore follow that the state's Republicans -- headed by Jindal or no -- are exactly a bunch of Einsteins.

Before Jindal's election, about the biggest idea the Louisiana GOP had was "For a good time, call Wendy Cortez." And we see where that got U.S. Sen. David Vitter.

Then there's this bit of political idolatry from James P. Lucier, writing in The Wall Street Journal:

No, this is the time for change, real change. This is a time for someone whom everybody knows to be the rising star of the GOP, the new governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal.

And what a governor! Having taken office in January, after winning 54% of the vote in the open-field primary, Mr. Jindal immediately called a special session of the legislature and persuaded them to pass his 64-point agenda for ethics reform. They said ethics reform couldn't be done in Louisiana--a state whose reputation as a cesspool is legendary--but he did it in a two-week session. Now he's calling a second special session to pass the tax cuts necessary to jump-start the post-Katrina economy in his state.

I'M MIDDLE-AGED, I'm too fat, and I have a bad knee. If I went back home to touch the hem of my gubna's bidness suit, do you think I could be thin, young and have my lost hair back?

I didn't think so.

But it seems like Rebubbacans -- in some cases, the same ones who've been so aghast at the messianism of the Cult of Obama -- lust to bestow no less a plethora of mythical, wonder-working powers upon their own Great Brown Hope.

And the Rebubbacans' "theological proofs" are even more scanty than the Cult of Obama's. After all, the Louisiana savior merely jumped from wonkdom to wonkdom before losing to Kathleen Blanco in the 2003 gubernatorial race, then served an undistinguished term and a half in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Now, let me return to some of that Ham-handed purple prose on Townhall.com.

Jindal is the GOP messiah because he's going to fix "one of the most uneducated, unethical, and unhealthy states in the union." Oh, yes. He will do this despite being born, raised, educated and culturally assimilated in "one of the most uneducated, unethical, and unhealthy states in the union."

See, Bobby Jindal went to my old high school -- Baton Rouge Magnet High -- almost a decade after I did. It was -- and is -- an island of excellence established, staffed and funded by the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, a governmental body Louisiana Republicans just love to hate . . . and which they regularly try to deny tax revenue because it's irredeemably awful, don't you know?

SO WHAT WE HAVE is the Rebubbacans' new messiah, educated by a school system that oughtn't have been able to properly educate a GOP savior . . . because it had not yet been healed by his policy touch. After all, Jindal was still in his messianic-formation program -- in that Louisiana public school.

In a school system many white Baton Rougeans, many of them loyal Rebubbacans, were so busy fleeing.

Got that?

Oops.

What kind of Republican messiah is this who can arise from unhealthy, unethical and uneducated backwardness? Probably an unneeded one. To steal a line from that other messiah, Louisianians themselves are the change they've been waiting for.

All they've needed all along is to just do it.

Right there in Baton Rouge, ordinary citizens and their "broken" institutions already have, after all, turned out a real-life political savior. Go figure.