Jindal: “We’re here to win Iowa”

BOONE - Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, now an officially announced candidate for the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nomination, said Tuesday he's in it to win it in Iowa - the state with the post position in the selection process.

Jindal, 43, a second-term governor who previously spent four year in Congress, told a lunch-hour crowd of about 50 at a local restaurant he would win next February's Iowa precinct caucuses and later punctuated that prediction while talking with reporters in the parking lot outside the business that served as a campaign stop.

'I'm here to win Iowa. I'm here to win not just Iowa. Our plan is to win every state and win the election,” said Jindal, who is spending much of the week campaigning in the 2016 leadoff state. 'I don't know why anybody would get in the race for president unless they were getting in it to win it.”

Jindal spent much of his time during his Boone stop decrying President Barack Obama's policies and recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on health care coverage and same-sex marriage and explaining how he would run the country differently while protecting individual freedoms and religious liberty.

He also took aim at 2016 Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, calling it an 'unacceptable” national security breach that she conducted State Department business via a private email account and criticizing the process by which she is releasing the contents of those messages.

'First, the American public is only getting the emails that Hillary Clinton herself is allowing us to see. She has already edited the emails, and has already destroyed the ones she did not want us to see, which makes the whole thing a meaningless charade,” he said.

'Secondly, and far more importantly, by choosing to use her own server in her own house she created a major breach of national security,” Jindal added. 'The real issue is that while the American people will never see these emails, it is likely that the Russians and the Chinese already have all of them. This is the real consequence of having a Secretary of State who unlawfully chose to conduct America's foreign policy business on her own private email system.”

If members of Congress want to get the original emails, Jindal said they might have to enlist the help of 'hardworking hackers.” He also said Clinton's national security breach and her support for Obama's 'failed policies” that continue America on a path toward socialism 'disqualify” her from becoming the next U.S. president.

'The world's become a more dangerous place under the failed foreign policy of Secretary Clinton and President Barack Obama,” noted Jindal, who pledged to pare back the federal government but would rebuild America's defense in the process to restore the nation's lead role as a world power.