Jindal: Obama's failure a 'gotcha game'--by Mark Silva

Jindal jokes that his own national speech cannot be played at Guantanamo.

President Barack Obama's "failure'' equals the Republican Party's "success:'' Increasingly, some of the GOP's leading voices are annunciating a calculus that attaches their party's fortunes in the midterm and presidential elections beyond to Obama's failure.

It might be an innocuous calculus, if the health of the nation's economy and success of its people weren't at stake.

Radio's Rush Limbaugh struck the theme when he first said, "I want Obama to fail.'' The GOP's Mitt Romney, a candidate for president in 2008, clarified it somewhat when he said that it is "the liberal agenda'' of Obama which should fail.

And now Bobby Jindal, Republican governor of Louisiana and one of the party's presidential prospects for 2012 or beyond, tells his party that it's all right for Republicans to wish failure upon the Democratic president -- depending on what it is that the president is trying to do..

Jindal, addressing party leaders and donors at a congressional fundraiser last night playing opposite the president's prime-time news conference, called the premise of the question -- "Do you want the president to fail?" -- the "latest gotcha game" being perpetrated by Democrats against Republicans.

""Make no mistake: Anything other than an immediate and compliant, 'Why no sir, I don't want the president to fail,' is treated as some sort of act of treason, civil disobedience or political obstructionism," Jindal said at the political fundraiser attended by 1,200 people. "This is political correctness run amok."

Jindal told his party that he would not be "browbeaten on this, and I will not kowtow to their correctness."

"My answer to the question is very simple: 'Do you want the president to fail?' It depends on what he is trying to do."

Jindal, a former two-term member of Congress, was in Washington to help members of Congress raise more than $6 million for the 2010 midterm elections.

Jindal's appearance came with the request video tribute for a player whose intentions haven't been made perfectly clear: Video of favorable TV reports about Jindal preceded his introduction to the audience. And he spoke of putting the GOP back on track.

Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are on a "spending spree,'' he said, which "is costing the taxpayers more than the Iraq war, more than the Vietnam War, and, near and dear to my heart, even more than the Louisiana Purchase."

Obama delivered his own address, insisting that his budget initiatives are crucial to the long-term recovery of the nation, just 12 blocks away. Jindal had delivered the formal, televised response to the president when Obama addressed a joint session of Congress, a response panned by many at the time.

"Many of you have asked that I reprise my State of the Union response speech," Jindal told the crowd last night. "That was a joke by the way. It's OK to laugh about it.... I have just learned that because of President Obama's opposition to torture, it is now illegal to show my speech to prisoners at Gitmo.''

But Jindal was not joking about this:
"It's time to declare our time of introspection and navel-gazing officially over. "It's time to get on with the business of charting America's future. So, as of now, be it hereby resolved that we will focus on America's future, and on standing up for fiscal sanity, before it is too late."

Since Limbaugh first voiced the failure strategy, the White House has attempted to label him as the voice of the Republican Party - well aware that the policy of "No'' holds little appeal for people at a time when Obama is trying to right the economy.

Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff for President Obama, labeled Limbaugh as "the voice and intellectual force'' of the GOP.

Limbaugh himself has attempted to clarify his wishes: At the Conservative Political Action Committee, he said: "What is so strange about being honest and saying, 'I want Barack Obama to fail, if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation?

""Why would I want that to succeed?'"

Romney, too, has attempted to draw a line through what policies of the administration should fail and which should succeed - just as Jindal says it's a matter of where they want Obama to fail.

"I want liberal policies to fail,'' Romney replied. "I want him to fail in trying to put in place a health care plan that takes away the private sector from health care. I want him to fail in this cap and trade program as long as China and Brazil and Indonesia are not going to play in it. But I want him to succeed as a president, meaning, I want him to succeed in strengthening our economy, keeping us free, bringing our troops home in success from Iraq and Afghanistan. But I don't want his liberal policies to succeed.''

Former President George W. Bush, for one, has publicly refrained from joining the argument. "I'm not going to spend my time criticizing him,'' the former president said of his successor at Bush's first paid post-office speech Calgary recently. "There are plenty of critics in the arena,'' Bush said. "He deserves my silence.

"I love my country a lot more than I love politics," Bush said. "I think it is essential that he be helped in office."

But Limbaugh, Romney and Jindal wouldn't be the first to wish failure upon the opposition.

Bill Sammons of Fox News recently reported that, at a breakfast meeting with reporters the morning of 9/11, before anyone there knew of the terrorist attacks, Bill Clinton adviser James Carville and pollster Stanley Greenberg both said they wanted President Bush to fail - then, after everyone in the room learned of the assaults, Carville called off his spell."Given the circumstances, the entire thing had changed everything,'' Carville recently said. "And thank God that I had the good sense to realize that the United States was at war and that changed everything. Unlike Mr. Limbaugh, who four times after he said it, when the United States is at war, fighting three different wars, kept insisting he wanted the president to fail at a time of war.''

"Once I found out that the country was at war, I said, 'I don't mean that. Whatever I said disregard it. It's inoperative.'''

The operative word of the GOP, for now, is that the president's liberal policies should fail. The president has readily attached his own fate to the success of those policies.

It would seem to be a sink or swim standoff that these two parties face, all or nothing, winner take the White House.