• By MARK BALLARD
• Capitol news bureau
• Published: Jan 4, 2009 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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If you need a friend, get a dog. It’s trench warfare out there pal.” That’s what corporate raider Gordon Gekko told his young protégé in the 1987 movie, “Wall Street,” starring Michael Douglas.

Gov. Bobby Jindal won’t get a puppy. Jindal says he recently chided Barack Obama for bringing up the topic in the first place during the president-elect’s victory speech, in which a dog was promised to the Obama daughters.

Jindal apparently thinks he has the friends-thing licked without the dog. Like any super salesman, Jindal tells everyone what they want to hear and they love him for it.

His sales pitches for Louisiana — and himself — are both Jindal’s greatest weakness and his greatest strength.

Whether Jindal is running for president, all those many fundraising trips to other states and all those many appearances on national media can’t help but raise awareness of Louisiana, a state with only about 4.2 million people that is known mostly around the world as the corrupt area surrounding New Orleans.

His highly publicized town hall meetings around the state and his unadvertised worship at church services around north Louisiana bring a real live governor face-to-face with small-town people who haven’t seen one in the flesh since Earl K. Long.

Jindal builds confidence and optimism with tales of an ethics gold standard, of bloated budgets under control, of less taxes, of a broken public health system about to be fixed. Everyone leaves smiling.

As good as it sounds, the truth, to quote Oscar Wilde, is rarely pure and never simple.

This past week, for instance, Jindal ballyhooed chopping the state’s budget by $341 million. Only $162 million of that amount was immediate. The rest awaits legislative approval. And $31.8 million comes from not filling 707 hiring-freeze vacancies in the 103,775 state work force — money that presumably wasn’t being spent on salaries anyway.

“Your average taxpayer wants to know what’s happening with overall government spending.” That was Jindal’s explanation two weeks ago to Capitol news bureau reporter Michelle Millhollon for how he could claim on national television to have personally cut the state budget by 12 percent when that drop was primarily because of the federal government sending less money to Louisiana and that, in fact, the portion of the budget that he and the Louisiana Legislature directly control increased.

Jindal’s aversion to disappointing people was most prominent when legislators tried to double their pay without public debate. Jindal initially agreed to go along. It was only after voters voiced anger that Jindal switched sides and, in June, vetoed the pay hike.

Jindal’s ethics reform requires all manner of public officials to report their personal finances. Those disclosures and other tweaks should serve to check the widespread feeling that government employees enrich themselves at public expense. Jindal bragged on national television that The Center for Public Integrity had ranked Louisiana No. 1 because of those changes. But the Washington, D.C.,  investigative journalism organization responded in November: “The center has never said that Louisiana ethics law is ‘on top of the list.’ It’s good — don’t get us wrong — but, sorry, Guv, we can’t give you the top ranking.”

And the center didn’t even consider how Jindal’s administration also weakened enforcement of all the ethics laws — old and new.
Though Jindal now acts like the engineer, during much of the spring the governor was on board the legislative train that cut taxes for higher-income taxpayers. The so-called “Stelly rollback” lets individual filers making more than $100,000 annually keep $500, the maximum allowed. The tax break’s cap of $1,000 is only available to couples who file jointly and together report more than $160,000 a year. The rollback means $359 million dollars less in the state treasury.