Below The Beltway

In today’s New York Times, William Kristol makes the case:

[A] McCain staffer called my attention to this finding in the latest Fox News poll: McCain led Obama in the straight match-up, 46 to 43. Voters were then asked to choose between two tickets, McCain-Romney vs. Obama-Clinton. Obama-Clinton won 47 to 41.

That reversal of a three-point McCain lead to a six-point deficit for the McCain ticket suggests what might happen (a) when the Democrats unite, and (b) if McCain were to choose a conventional running mate, who, as it were, reinforced the Republican brand for the ticket. As the McCain aide put it, this is what will happen if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing) generic Republican number.

Maybe that’s why, in separate conversations last week, no fewer than four McCain staffers and advisers mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick the 36-year-old Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal. They’re tempted by the idea of picking someone so young, with real accomplishments and a strong reformist streak.

It might also be a way to confront the issue of McCain’s age (71), which private polls and focus groups suggest could be a real problem. A Jindal pick would implicitly acknowledge the questions and raise the ante. The message would be: “You want generational change? You can get it with McCain-Jindal — without risking a liberal and inexperienced Obama as commander in chief.” I would add that it was after McCain spent considerable time with Jindal in New Orleans recently, and reportedly found him, as he has before, personally engaging and intellectually impressive, that the campaign’s informal name-dropping of Jindal began.

Personally, I don’t buy it. I’ve noted before that Jindal is an interesting politician and, down the road, could be the new face of the Republican Party.

But not yet.

For one thing, he’s only 36 years old, the same age that John McCain was when Bobby Jindal was born. As Justin Gardner notes, there’s no better way for McCain to highlight just how old he is than by selecting a nominee who is literally half his age. Bad move.

For another, Jindal has only been Governor of Louisiana for a few months. Before that, his only political experience came from serving in the state legislature Congress for three years. If experience and being ready from day one are going to be part of McCain’s fall campaign, then picking someone who has less political experience than Barack Obama, and no foreign policy experience, would be a big mistake.

Finally, Jindal himself has said he doesn’t want the job.

Of course, McCain might still offer the spot to him, in which case Ross Douthat explains why Jindal should say no:

The downside is too far down, and the upside doesn’t have enough up to it. If you run for president and lose in the primaries, you can come back and run again: Just ask Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore and John McCain. If you run for president and lose in the general election, well, at least you’ve lost pursuing an office that’s worth having in and of itself. But if you run for vice president and lose – as is more likely than not for any GOP ticket this time around – the odds are your national ambitions are finished, since no losing veep since FDR has come back and taken the Oval Office. And if you run for vice president and win – well, in some cases you’ve taken an important step toward the Presidency, but in others you’ve consigned yourself to losing four-to-eight years that might have been spent more profitably elsewhere. Somewhere like, say, the Louisiana statehouse.

(…)

The question, though, is whether a young and promising governor like Jindal would want to be dubbed the heir-apparent to a President who would have won the White House in spite of his party’s deep unpopularity, and whose administration would be almost certainly defined as the last gasp of Reagan-era Republicanism, rather than the first step into whatever’s next for the GOP. Which is to say, even if a veep slot led to a Presidential campaign further down the road, by hitching his ambitions to a McCain Administration, Jindal might be signing up to play Walter Mondale, rather than the Bill Clinton he could hope to be instead.

In which case, there would not be a President Jindal in, say, 2017.