I yield.

Daniel -

The candidate with both charisma and wonkery tends to win.

As long as the moneycons are OK with him, yeah (otherwise you have Huckabee, who for my money has both to spare).

Serious question – do you think Jindal has charisma (that is, that the GOP base responds to him as charismatic, particularly in a Weberian sense, as applied to politics)? I don’t see it in the couple of Youtubes I’ve seen of his gubernatorial campaign, but then my ears detect different dogwhistles, I guess, since the only major party candidates since W. Clinton that seem at all charismatic to me are Obama and Huckabee, maybe Buchanan a little bit. I just don’t see Palin as charismatic (which has nothing to do with policy disagreement; I have no problem in seeing charisma in candidates I disagree with, for example Huckabee and Reagan).

Worse–he may have had contact with people from “Old Europe”! That is scary.

“The problem that I think you [Daniel] underestimate is that Jindal doesn’t (IMHO) appeal to the id, or really to resentment either.”

Jindal may not be viscerally appealing in some ways, but there is another side to Republicans that prizes aspiration and (much to my dismay) optimism when it comes from someone on their side. Palin riles up the crowd, but Jindal has the potential to inspire and perhaps even persuade newcomers. If you can have a candidate who generates enthusiasm and is also prepared and knowledgeable, that is the candidate who will prevail. The candidate with both charisma and wonkery tends to win.

He should tell people that he thought he was accepting an invitation to study in Oxford, Mississippi.

It would also be the first time since GHWB that the GOP had nominated someone with an impressive academic record. Can’t have that damn elitism. Who knows, at Oxford Jindal might even have palled around with socialists?

Snark aside, I agree that Jindal is a formidable potential candidate for 2012. Assuming he runs, and gets the coveted dittohead endorsement early enough (yeah, I know he has El Rushbo’s but the mass still is with the Divine Miss P; obviously we have a couple of years to go before we see how the correlation of forces settles out), he could indeed but the standardbearer of whatever constitutes the “movement” at that time.

The problem that I think you [Daniel] underestimate is that Jindal doesn’t (IMHO) appeal to the id, or really to resentment either. _That’s_ what stirs up the base, or so it certainly appears. That won’t be a fatal weakness in the primary only if there is nobody opposing who can tap the id.

Knowing Palin for the wedge-issue campaigner that she is, she will be a more formidable contender four years from now thanks to having more time to think about national issues. She is a savvy politician, if not the most intelligent or curious. For a large part of this country, that doesn’t matter. And that’s why, at least in the primary, even Jindal is at risk.

To the extent that Bush is really a Texan, Bush is from west Texas, which is not all that Southern. Jindal, like Huckabee, is culturally much more Southern. Technically, both Presidents Bush hail from a state in the Old Confederacy, but certainly no one would call the father a Southerner; I would say that the son shouldn’t be called that, either.

So, again, there’s a difference between saying that people would try nasty tactics against Jindal and saying that those tactics have a prayer of succeeding. I think they’d fail, because–unlike McCain or Obama–Jindal (despite his skin color) is pretty clearly a southerner and a social conservative. Maybe anti-Catholic attacks would have traction in some parts of the country; that seems more likely than that he’d be attacked for being non-white or non-Christian.

I would really love to believe that Palinmania would die but she has the advantage of being a woman and garnering the women’s vote. Every problem Obama had against Palin, Jindal could realistically have too

But Palin’s a national laughingstock and Obama/Biden is set to crush her ticket next Tuesday. So a candidate in 2012 might be happy to have the same “problem” with Palin that Obama is having. And, again, once it’s a free-for-all primary and voters can pick from a variety of candidates, I suspect that the GOP’s stated reasons for loving Sarah Palin will suddenly seem much less important to the vast majority of voters.

Woah, “W” isn’t Southern enough? Are we talking Southern, East o the Mississippi only and South of the Mason-Dixon exclusively?

I would really love to believe that Palinmania would die but she has the advantage of being a woman and garnering the women’s vote. Every problem Obama had against Palin, Jindal could realistically have too – the sexism lie/smear works to her advantage as both sword and shield. If she resurfaces with Schmidt/Rove like tricks, Jindal could easily succumb because this part of the country is all to willing to believe the worst about anyone foreign.

I’ll just preface this by saying that I don’t believe any of the various rumors about Obama. That said….

Obama is MUCH more susceptible to this kind of smear campaign than Jindal would be. Obama’s father was a Muslim, Obama spent part of his childhood in a majority-Muslim country, to the extent that he could point to his Christianity as a defense that just allowed his enemies to run videotape of his dashiki-clad pastor screaming “Goddamn America,” etc. On top of that, many of Obama’s supporters made the blunder of running off at the mouth about how Obama could bridge the gap between the US and the Muslim world, etc.

I don’t know much about Jindal, but it seems like it would be much harder to lie about who he is. His religious background seems pretty clear, he grew up in the United States, and his parents are from a country and a heritage about which most Americans don’t have any negative preconceptions. Plus, he talks like a good ole boy, whereas Obama’s professorial tone marks him as someone who can be attacked as “other than.”

It’s also worth keeping in mind that, even with a candidate (Obama) who was taylor-made to be undone by attacks on his “American-ness,” these smear tactics will probably fail and Obama will probably win big. It’s not necessarily an approach begging to be re-tried in four years.

Not really, which is another reason why I think he has a good shot at the nomination. The successful approach that Obama has pioneered seems to be this: don’t make voters accept too many changes all at once. Jindal would represent a pretty significant shift for GOP nominees: Southern and non-white (they have never had either for a nominee). To ask the rank-and-file to endorse a major change in policies might be asking too much on top of all that. This is one reason why Jindal will be considered a safe and acceptable candidate.

Obama is a conventional liberal, and Jindal is by and large a conventional conservative in the party line mold, but I think this is how Obama has been and Jindal may be able to appeal to the general electorate. Having their respectives party base secured by the very conventionality is what makes them viable national candidates. It is also what makes them uninteresting to me, but they are not trying to win my vote.

Will Jindal be a bold policy innovator in Louisiana and then in a national campaign? Who knows? He might surprise me. On the whole, I think he doesn’t have to be much of a policy innovator, and if he can frame his successes in reforming government in Louisiana (assuming that he racks up quite a few) as a vindication of his conventional conservatism he will flourish in a political climate in the GOP that is going to reward a back-to-basics candidate.

As for dirty tricks again Jindal, someone might try them but I think you will be amazed at how temporary Palinmania will be when there is an alternative of a clearly superior reforming governor. The enthusiasm for Palin was the product of deeply demoralized Republicans looking for something to get excited about. Given a choice at another time, many Republicans are going to take an interest in non-Palin candidates.

And, to anticipate the inevitable complaint that I know someone will want to make, yes it is fairly ridiculous to be talking about the next election before this one is over.