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In November 2008, most Americans acknowledged George W. Bush’s presidency as a failure. The Republican Party, unquestionably complicit in that failure, was down for the count; Barack Obama defeated Republican John McCain, a popular war hero, decisively. Conservatism itself seemed rocked on its heels, perhaps for good. When recently inaugurated President Obama delivered an address to a joint session of Congress to tout his $787 billion stimulus package, just 8 percent of TV viewers said they disapproved of Obama’s performance. By sharp contrast, “rising star” Republican Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana delivered a lackluster response, which featured an attack on a $140 million outlay for “something called ‘volcano monitoring’”—just a month before a volcanic eruption sent a sixty-thousand-foot cloud of ash over Alaska. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks called Jindal’s “stale, government-is-the-problem” ideology “a disaster for the Republican Party.”