Gosh, the Republicans don't do tokenism well. The first step is: don't do it. This year, the Democrats had a choice between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, two extremely knowledgeable and accomplished presidential candidates who both happened to belong to groups that had never before been represented in the presidency. Obama managed to get it, and his race had some effect on the outcome, to be sure. But I keep hearing about Bobby Jindal as a Republican Obama, and it just doesn't fit. Jindal is not very charismatic. I've seen interviews with him--he comes off as a normal, likeable, decent guy, but he just doesn't give off the sort of energy you associate with a president.
Now, would Jindal do a better job than Mike Huckabee as president? I don't know. Better than Palin? Almost certainly. Better than Romney? Probably not. He's credible and smart, and he's not a WASP, so putting him on the ticket would be a good rebranding move for Republicans, especially if he decides to try to offer some conservative policy solutions that go beyond cutting the cap gains tax. But he's largely unknown to the country, he's in a party saddled with a crapload of Southern racists--he did win in Louisiana but only on his second try. And there is a story about an exorcism he performed in college, which would serve to turn the dude into a punchline. In any event, it's unclear to me why he draws so much interest, as he's the culturally conservative governor of a Deep Southern state who just happens not to be white. His record is, so much as I can tell, much thinner than Romney's, and it seems that Republicans still don't get it if they think that race was the only reason that Obama won this thing, and they'd be more advised to try to find somebody along the Sarkozy model in France than just another brother of another color...
