Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's speech Thursday night to the Republican National Committee has been attracting positive attention through the weekend. Here are some excerpts, which are newsworthy in part because of the not-so-subtle jabs at Paul Ryan, who is a possible rival of Mr. Jindal's for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016:
Today's conservatism is completely wrapped up in solving the hideous mess that is the federal budget, the burgeoning deficits, the mammoth federal debt, the shortfall in our entitlement programs…even as we invent new entitlement programs.
We seem to have an obsession with government bookkeeping.
This is a rigged game, and it is the wrong game for us to play.
Today it's the fiscal cliff, tomorrow it's the fiscal apocalypse, and then it will be the fiscal Armageddon.
But I have news for you; our government already went off the fiscal cliff.
It happened years ago, and has happened every year for many years.
Today's conservatism is in love with zeroes.
We think if we can just unite behind a proposal to cut the deficit and debt…if we can just put together a spreadsheet and a power point and a TV ad….all will be well.
This obsession with zeroes has everyone in our party focused on what? Government.
By obsessing with zeroes on the budget spreadsheet, we send a not-so-subtle signal that the focus of our country is on the phony economy of Washington – instead of the real economy out here in Charlotte, and Shreveport, and Cheyenne.
We as Republicans have to accept that government number crunching – even conservative number crunching – is not the answer to our nation's problems.
We also must face one more cold hard fact – Washington is so dysfunctional that any budget proposal based on fiscal sanity will be deemed 'not-serious' by the media, it will fail in the Senate, and it won't even make it to the President's desk where it would be vetoed anyway.
In fact, any serious proposal to restrain government growth is immediately deemed 'not-serious' in Washington. The Balanced Budget is deemed 'not-serious' in Washington.
… We must do all we can to stop what is rapidly becoming the bankrupting of our federal government.
But we as conservatives must dedicate our energies and our efforts to growing America, to growing the American economy, to showing the younger generations how America can win the future.
That path does not lie in government. If more government were the answer, our economy would be booming right now. That path has been tried.
You can't hire enough government workers or give enough taxpayer money to your friends who own green energy companies to create prosperity. The facts are in, it's a disaster.
Balancing our government's books is not what matters most. Government is not the end all and be all.
The health of America is not about government at all. Balancing government's books is a nice goal, but that is not our primary objective.
Our objective is to grow the private sector. We need to focus our efforts on ideas to grow the American economy, not the government economy.
If you take nothing else away from what I say today, please understand this – We must not become the party of austerity. We must become the party of growth. .. We believe in creating abundance, not redistributing scarcity…. If any rational human being were to create our government anew, today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government workers.
We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.