Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal urged Republicans to "stop being the stupid party," transcend their image as the party of the rich, and reach out to broader numbers of voters in a 45 minute interview he gave, on Monday, to Politico and reported by Jonathan Martin in Jindal: End 'dumbed-down conservatism.'
Jindal encouraged Republicans to reject "anti-intellectulism, and to become “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." Perhaps anticipating a run for the presidency in 2016, he added that trying to organize an appeal to voters of “(s)imply being the anti-Obama party didn’t work. You can’t beat something with nothing."“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything,” Jindal told POLITICO in a 45-minute telephone interview. “We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.”
“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.”