Bobby Jindal: The GOP's best hope in 2012?
Barack Obama hasn't even been inaugurated as 44th US President yet, but the discussion in Republican circles has already turned to the list of candidates who might take him on in 2012. And since it takes at least two years to run for president these days, they need to focus on likely candidates within the two years. John McCain has already signalled that he is out of the running. Sarah Palin may have garnered enough support by 2010 to mobilise a campaign, but some Republicans are critical of her performance alongside McCain.
Step forward , the 37-year old Republican Governor of Louisiana, who could one day become America's first Asian-American president.
Jindal has already served two terms as a congressman and was installed as governor in January of this year (then 36, he became the youngest governor in the US and the first Indian-American governor in US history). Like Bill Clinton, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. A first-generation American, he converted to Catholicism, from Hinduism, while in High School, and has also pledged his faith publicly in Baptist and Pentecostal churches. While at school, he adopted the name 'Bobby', based on his favourite character from The Brady Bunch television show, though his legal name remains Piyush Jindal.
Where is he on the ? He supports the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools; he has written articles on healing and demon possession; he is pro-life; he has defended 'chemical castration' for some sex offenders; he supports legal protection for gun ownership; and while in the Congress he voted in favour of offshore oil and gas drilling and in favour of building a fence along the Mexican border.
Comment number 1.
At 14th Nov 2008, John Wright wrote:Ha! This is fun. Well, the elephant in the room now is RACE. And of course Obama is black.
But what I liked about the election of Obama was that he was elected not because of or in spite of his race, but completely without regard to his race. America became post-racial, in a sense. To follow it up with candidates from this ethnicity and that in 2012 seems like a bit of a step backward in some ways, because it would be so patently obvious that it was done to 'match history with history' so to speak, and for purely political and - yes - racial reasons.
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