Obama’s India visit a positive sign: Bobby Jindal

WASHINGTON - Louisiana’s Indian-American Republican Governor Bobby Jindal says one of the things that he likes about Democrat President Barack Obama is his building an economic relationship with India.

“I think that when he went to India and made a strong relationship with the world’s largest democracy, a free market economy. That was a positive sign,” he told CNN Tuesday when asked to name one thing on which he agrees with Obama.

Jindal, who is generally highly critical of Obama, also said: “I agree with his refusing to bend down to the liberals that asked him to put an artificial … to withdraw artificially before we’re done in Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile, in an interview on Glenn Beck’s radio show, Jindal repeated his charge that at a meeting with the president during the gulf oil spill he and a parish official were told specifically by Obama not to go on TV and criticise him.

It was clear Obama was frustrated with the level of criticism he was getting, he said and went on to accuse Obama of caring more about perception and politics than actually cutting through the red tape and getting things done,

Back at CNN, Jindal said his Republican Party lost power because it defended spending and corruption it shouldn’t have tolerated.

“We need to earn our way back into being the majority party. We need to show the American people we’re going to govern differently. Stepping away from earmarks was a symbolic but important first step,” he argued.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)