Barely had the executive jets departed Boston's Logan Airport filled with disappointed Mitt Romney backers after the 2012 election than Bobby Jindal was out of the box declaiming on what the Republican Party needed to do to win back the White House. In an interview with Politico, Jindal declared that the GOP needed to "stop being the stupid party": "It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that," Jindal said. "It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters." He called on Republicans to be the "party of ideas, details and intelligent solutions," and to "stop reducing everything to mindless slogans, tag lines, 30-second ads that all begin to sound the same."
These remarks, along with similar ones Jindal made in the post-election weeks, helped vault the Louisiana governor back to the head of the Future of the Republican Party pack, where he'd been for a while before his unfortunate turn in the State of the Union response had tarnished his luster as the party's Wonk Wonder. Just a few months later, though, Jindal's prospects suffered another setback with the collapse of his high-profile effort to slash income taxes in his state. But now he's back yet again with another barnburner declaration, again in Politico, on what his party needs to do. In the span of just half a year, Jindal has flipped from scathingly self-critical to bluffly boosterish, telling his fellow Republicans that it's time for them to put on their "big-boy pants":
No more self-analysis; we’ve had our catharsis. The season for navel gazing has passed. Let’s stop defeating ourselves, get on offense, and go kick the other guys around. If you’ve followed the news over the past month, they are certainly asking for it. We are the conservative party in America — deal with it. We have a lot of dissenting voices. So what? Deal with it. The American public waxes and wanes. Fine. It will wax again soon enough. Deal with it, and start fighting for our principles instead of against them, so we can be in position to create the next wave.