Leveraging outrage

This is from a guest column that ran in the Advocate last week by former Jindal staffer Taylor Huckaby.  Hucakby describes what he sees as the Jindal campaign team's great strength. Their network of Christian fundies.

It was in a church near LSU called the Chapel on the Campus, where Jindal had his conversion experience, that I received my first lessons in political fury. Jindal’s inner circle, at the time of my involvement, was composed of experts who specialized in leveraging Christian outrage; curating that resentment was an art form they had perfected.

From Baton Rouge, we bused in hundreds of homeschooled kids from Alabama and Mississippi to do our bidding during the 2011 re-election campaign. The campaign even hired a full-time homeschool coordinator, who sat at the desk behind me and often pontificated about Lady Gaga being the Antichrist.

Like it or not, the name of the game in 2016 is going to be "curating resentment" in many forms. Historically, fundamentalist Christian resentment has been among the more electorally potent types of resentment when organized.  It never hurts to have a ready made machine that does just that thing.