Our View: Jindal should listen, learn

• Published: Jul 14, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Before her campaign to enter the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton conducted a “listening tour” across New York state that ostensibly was aimed at gauging the needs of her potential constituents.

Clinton’s listening tour, whatever its civic merits, also gave her a lot of free publicity, and a skeptic could argue that the tour was as much about Clinton as it was about the people she aspired to serve.

But Clinton was smart to acknowledge that when political figures meet with the public, the public deserves to be heard at least as much as the person at the podium. That reality is worth keeping in mind among leaders of all political stripes, and we hope it is not lost on Gov. Bobby Jindal as he travels around the state next month.

Jindal announced at a recent meeting of the Press Club of Baton Rouge that he is planning a series of town hall meetings across Louisiana in August. Such meetings can be a useful forum for Jindal to hear questions, comments and concerns from state residents, but only if Jindal and his staff handle such forums the right way.

The governor is known as a champion talker, as evidenced by his lengthy address to the Press Club. But the governor also must let voters know he is willing to listen.

The governor’s Press Club appearance was vintage Jindal. His remarks ran past schedule, and although he volunteered to stay past his scheduled departure to accommodate questions, the event still left too little time for reporters to quiz the governor on his policies and ideas.

This is part of a larger pattern of sharply controlled public access to the governor. The governor and his staffers frequently fail to return media calls, and the governor is too rarely placed in situations in which he can connect directly with voters.

That lack of access does not serve citizens, but in the long run, it won’t serve Jindal, either. We believe the insularity of the administration figured into its slow reaction to public anger over a proposed pay raise for state legislators. The governor eventually reversed his position and vetoed the raise, but only after an uproar so loud and long that even the politically tone-deaf could not avoid noticing. A governor more exposed to the day-to-day concerns of his constituents would have reacted much sooner, we believe.

The political strategy of sharply controlled media and public access to a chief executive was popularized by Karl Rove, a former aide to President Bush, and Rove seems to have quite a few disciples in Jindal’s inner circle.

Significantly, several events billed as forums for Bush to connect with the public have turned out to be shams — carefully orchestrated affairs in which those who question the president are handpicked ahead of time so that difficult questions can be avoided.

U.S. Sen. David Vitter used a variation of this strategy at a recent town hall meeting when his staffers asked participants to submit written questions ahead of time — a tactic that allowed the senator to choose only the questions he wanted to answer. Vitter apparently is worried about potentially embarrassing questions since being linked with a prostitution ring.

We hope Jindal and his aides refrain from these and similar gimmicks during his upcoming town hall meetings.

These forums should honor the true spirit of town hall meetings, in which citizens from all walks of life get a chance to ask questions of their leaders, no holds barred.