Just ignore him

When Bobby Jindal agreed to (probably) launch his Presidential campaign with a "prayer rally" on the LSU campus next month sponsored by an organization of violently anti-gay conspiracy-theorist theocrats he obviously did this in order to provoke a reaction.

Well now he will get one. 

A backlash is brewing over a prayer rally scheduled for LSU’s Pete Maravich Assembly Center next month featuring Gov. Bobby Jindal.

A Change.org petition created by an LSU alumnus urging LSU to not allow the event on campus has gotten nearly 1,000 signatures since Friday, and students are organizing a protest of the prayer rally, dubbed “The Response” because of its anti-gay ties.

It's probably a smarter course of action to just ignore Jindal's "rally."  That seems to be what Republican primary voters are doing  and it's working out just fine that way.  Everybody hates Bobby already. Why waste time and energy yelling at him for this desperate, phony and unoriginal stunt.

The event’s timing plays into Jindal’s possible political aspirations and appears to be ripped from the playbook of Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Jindal is expected to announce whether he will run for governor in the coming months. In recent weeks, he’s made multiple appearances on Fox News, traveled to Washington, D.C., for GOP events and policy speeches (including a trip that had him out of state on Election Day) and continued to ramp up interest in a possible presidential campaign. This week, he traveled to Iowa to speak to the Polk County GOP holiday party.

Perry faced a similar backlash over his association with the event and AFA’s involvement, though it doesn’t appear to have stuck. Perry, who leaves office next month, remains popular in his home state, though he didn’t win the GOP nomination for president.

Perry and Jindal are very close and tend to share advisers and staff and ghostwriters and such. So it's not surprising to see that the Jindal for Prez campaign is going to look an awful lot like Perry's did in 2012. 

Oh and, for the record, the "similar backlash" Perry's prayer meeting engendered didn't make a dent in his campaign. The mainstream press hailed it as "bold" and "positive." The difference, though, is the national press at the time more or less assumed the Governor of Texas would be a default front-runner and rushed in to give him all the attention he could want.  The Governor of Louisiana, on the other hand, is desperate to get noticed.  A protest is only going to help him do that.