Truly dirty campaigning

The Louisiana Democratic Party has, as Stuart Rothenberg points out, launched a truly dirty ad campaign against Republican Bobby Jindal alleging that he wrote a disparaging article against Protestants 13 years ago.

In the TV spot, the announcer charges that Jindal wrote articles that “insulted thousands of Louisiana Protestants,” and she holds up an article in which she says Jindal “doubts the morals and questions the beliefs of Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Pentecostals and other Protestant religions.”

The ad directs interested viewers to a website, www.JindalonReligion.com. (However, unless you are a subscriber to The New Oxford Review, you won’t be able to read Jindal’s entire articles.)

Polls have shown Jindal with a large lead in this year’s race for governor, which will take place in October. A November runoff would follow if no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote.

The ads are an obvious attempt to destroy Jindal in Protestant North Louisiana (they are not running in the heavily Catholic southern part of the state), a generally conservative part of the state where he underperformed four years ago, when he narrowly lost his last bid for governor to Kathleen Blanco (D). Blanco chose not to seek reelection – a wise move considering reviews of her performance after Hurricane Katrina and her standing with state voters

Ed Morrissey went ahead and did what most people won't do - pay the subscription fee to read Jindal's actual articles. And surprise, surprise. It's clear that the Democratic Party deliberately distorted his writings in order to inflame rural Louisiana Protestants.

purchased the first essay highlighted on the website that the Democrats set up to demonize Jindal's writings. In this, they cleverly write hyperbolic descriptions of his essays while hiding behind the knowledge that readers will have to pay to read them from New Oxford Review. For instance, the description on the essay I bought claims that "Jindal explains how Catholicism has more merit than all other Religions. Jindal states non-Catholics are burndened [sic] with "utterly depraved minds" and calls individuals who ignore the teachings of the Catholic church intellectually dishonest."

When I read Jindal's essay, however, it says nothing of the sort. Jindal quotes John Calvin as saying that all men are born "utterly depraved" and then argues against it:

Read the rest of Morrissey's examination of how low the Louisiana Democratic Party has sunk in trying to inflame religious bigotry to bring down a GOP opponent who is swamping them in the polls.

The Influence Peddler and Hot Air have more as well as the ad in question.

Every Louisiana Democrat should be made to answer whether they support such dirty tactics. As one Louisiana newspaper puts it,

Though we have long held that a man's or a woman's opinion on religion is a private matter that should remain between a man and his God or between a woman and her God, we recognize religion has always played a role in politics, and it probably always will.

Yet, for a political party—in this case the Louisiana Democratic Party—to knowingly lie about a candidate's views on religion was a bit too much to stomach. If the state Democratic Party possessed one iota of common sense or one ounce of decency, it would pull its ads criticizing Jindal's faith immediately.

Something tells us the Democrats won't do that.

The Democrats probably won't pull the ads because they're grasping for straws to chip away at Jindal's lead in the governor's race.

The primary election is Oct. 20.

The voters would do well to remember which political party it was in this year's governor's race that knowingly distorted a man's faith in Christ for its own political gain.

And you can read Quin Hillyer on why Bobby Jindal is such a formidable candidate and why the Democrats are so desperate to try to derail his campaign for governor. If he wins, in a few years, he'll be a star for Republicans and, I predict, will show up on a lot of lists for higher office.