Gov. Bobby Jindal: This Is ‘America That President Obama Wanted To Create’

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal presented a plan to rebuild America’s military strength and reaffirm the United States as a force for freedom and stability around the world. The potential 2016 presidential contender spoke to the American Enterprise Institute Monday as terrorist groups are destabilizing the Middle East and North Africa, Iraq is on the brink of becoming a failed state, and Russian forces attempt to destroy a pro-West government in Ukraine.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

GOV. BOBBY JINDAL (R-LA): As we draw to the close of the politically relevant portion of the Obama presidency – the years in which the president had the power to get anything done, and the interest in doing it – we are at a point where we can assess the nation and the world that President Obama is leaving us.

Much of the recent media coverage of the Obama presidency has focused on the frustrations of the president with the political process.

Time and again, he turns to the Third Person to explain the ineffectiveness of his leadership.

It is always “they” who stand against his noble aims to help the people, “they” who botched Obamacare, “they” who underestimated the threats of ISIS. For this president, there’s always someone else to blame.

For all that has been written about President Obama’s negative impact on American businesses, I’ll give him this: No president has done so much for the straw men industry.

Every day he sets one on fire. Whatever you want to say about his golf game, the guy knows how to use a flamethrower.

But I would argue that this blaming of the Third Person is actually wrong.

Because for the most part, we actually live in the America that President Obama wanted to create.

We live in the country and in the world that progressives wanted.

Where we are didn’t happen by accident. It didn’t happen because President Obama was frustrated by the political process.

It happened because, as Richard Weaver told us, “ideas have consequences.”

And what does an America governed under those ideas look like?

On the domestic front, we are a nation faltering slowly through a lackluster recovery, one that has been marked by profits gathered by the powerful and well-connected, and stagnant wages and dimmed prospects for those of us who are not.

It is a nation with effectively a cradle to grave welfare state, with a federal government that bribes the states with taxpayer dollars – borrowed from China our kids will have to repay – to grow entitlement programs for childless able-bodied adults which trap them in a lifetime of disincentives for success.

It is a nation marked by exhaustion and discouragement and fear, where wealth and power are centralized in an immense and out of control federal government.

It is a nation where the people feel they no longer have a voice, where the massive and cronyist administrative state seeks to control almost every aspect of our lives.

It is a nation of backroom deals where regulators run the show and those who play ball get bailouts.