Special to WorldTribune.com

Governor Jindal also gave Louisiana a shot of confidence. I fled that state after the Edwin Edwards vs. David Duke race where my parents had a sticker on the back of their car “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.” I never even considered I could return home to what I considered a third world hell hole. Hell, a family down the road from us literally kept a cow on a cinderblock in the front yard for milk. Everyone I went to high school with it seems either wound up working for the state, working for Exxon, or going to jail. Louisiana was a state without a lot of hope. …

After Katrina, the Democrats in the state imploded. The old ways and old bureaucracy collapsed. Bobby Jindal kiar lost to Kathleen Blanco in his first run for governor. The Democrats ran a blatantly racist campaign in which they intentionally darkened Bobby’s skin in mail pieces and referred to him as “Piyush Jindal,” which is his actual given name that no one calls him. In 2007, Bobby came back to beat Blanco after Katrina. He never looked back.

Bobby Jindal oversaw a fundamental transformation in Louisiana. State industries were downsized and privatized. People were forced to compete in the private sector. The state payroll stopped serving as an extension of the welfare state. Ethics reforms were pushed through the legislature quickly. Legislators fought Jindal, but Jindal used his mandate effectively for change. Soon, businesses started pouring into Louisiana. More and more industry came in providing more and more people a way out of poverty. …

At the age of 24, Bobby Jindal became the Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. At 28, he was the president of the University of Louisiana System, overseeing more than 80,000 college students in the state. At 30, President Bush appointed him Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. By 33, he had become a congressman. He was a Governor before turning 37. It is a pretty damning indictment on the whole debate process this year that a man with that resume could not make it on the main debate stage in any of the Republican debates.

Bobby Jindal is the smartest Governor in America, one of the great reformers of the twenty-first century, and a genuinely kind soul. He . . . may not be the man Louisiana wants right now, but he is Governor the state needed. I probably will never move home, but I know now that I could. It is thanks to the single minded determination of a native son of the Bayou State whose parents were immigrants to our nation. I suspect we have not heard the last from Bobby Jindal and it would be our loss if this was the end of his career in politics.

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  Bobby Jidal, LIFE, The back story on Gov. Bobby Jindal, WorldTribune.com