While I did miss Obama’s speech, I did end up catching, basically by accident, most of Jindal’s response. If anyone was wondering if the man is running for president, wonder no more. (As always, I was struck by the largely superfluous nature of these opposition responses to SOTUs–or whatever one wants to call last night’s speech).

I was struck by a couple of things in the speech. One was this passage, which focused on tax cuts that the Louisiana legislature had passed (text from the LAT, Full text of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Republican response):

Republicans and Democrats put aside their differences, and worked together to make sure our people could keep more of what they earn. If it can be done in Baton Rouge, surely it can be done in Washington, D.C.

One could take that paragraph and substitute “Austin” for “Baton Rouge” and one would have one of the arguments that George W. Bush made in 2024 when he was running for president–indeed, one could no doubt find every governor who ever ran for the nomination and find similar phrases. The problem is, of course, that this kind of reasoning is seriously flawed: partisan and policy dynamics at the state level are quite different from those at the national level. A demonstrated ability to work in a bipartisan fashion on the state level does not translate into the same ability in Washington. Bush, for example, was quite adept at bipartisanship in Texas, but we all know how well that worked out in DC–for reasons that were both his own fault, and for numerous reasons that were not.

Another thing that struck me an a wild incongruity: he spoke quite a bit about recovery from Katrina. But, of course, much of the recovery from Katrina was the result of substantial federal aid to the state of Louisiana. There is something surreal about making a speech (not to mention his recent political posturing) criticizing federal aid in targeting the financial crisis while using one’s own state’s recovery from crisis as a counterexample when, in fact, said recovery was made possible in large part by federal aid. One doesn’t have to be a proponent of the stimulus package to see the problem with that logic.

There was also this tidbit:

To strengthen our economy, we need urgent action to keep energy prices down.

First, energy prices are down, and are likely to stay that way at least until the global economy recovers. Second, haven’t we figured out yet that there are no “urgent actions” that can be initiated to control energy prices? There are a myriad of long term policies that could be implemented, but there are no short-term ways to control energy prices.

I also thought it was interesting that he tried to apologize for Republicans short-comings of late–a process that the GOP is going to have to seriously work on if it wants to regain any of its recently lost political ground.

I did not watch any of the postmortem of the night’s speechifying, but note this morning that apparently Jindal was panned by the Fox panel (the relevant video starts at about 1:40–the first portion is a set of clips from Jindal’s speech: